The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Series: The Lord of the Rings Prequel

Genre: Fantasy

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I read this book despite all of the complaints I’d heard about how boring it was and how hard it was to get into it. After all, that was the very reason that I had not yet read this book in the first place. However, I read it anyways, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t boring at all. Perhaps I was able to get through the book because of my pure determination to prove those who told me I couldn’t do it wrong, but if that had been the fact then I would not have found the book quite entertaining. It is true, some parts were a bit boring, but the plot was generally fast paced and there were many interesting adventures that Mr. Baggins encountered.

However, in my opinion it was very hard to connect with any of the characters, which made it a little harder to remain interested. The whole book felt quite emotionless, while I am used to overly emotional novels (this may be explained by the fact that Tolkien was writing for children, but I explain my reasoning further down). I found that most of the characters were very flat and one-sided, besides Bilbo Baggins himself who evolved from a stuck-up respectable hobbit to a brave, clever, and adventurous burglar. I read somewhere that there are two types of books: commercial and literary, where commercial books are driven by the plot and literary books are driven by the characters. I would classify The Hobbit as a commercial book—now, don’t think I’m bashing Tolkien’s writing ability; I most definitely am not—because it focuses mainly on the events taking place and on the unfolding of the plot. That means that it wasn’t the author’s purpose to get the readers to connect with the characters so much as tell an entertaining story.

And what an entertaining story he told! Having grown up with The Lord of the Rings movies, I was already accustomed to the world Tolkien created, so his imagination wasn’t as much a surprise to me. Also, there were many worlds created after his time that rivaled his, and so imagination like his became slightly more common. But, when I realize that these books were published in the early 20^th century, I am greatly surprised at the wonderful stories he created, and I praise his work immensely.

Also, the whole time I was reading this book I couldn’t help but compare it to the movies recently created, which is why the lack of character depth was so surprising to me. In the movies, there were many personalities to each character and many back-stories. Yet in the books we did not get to know hardly any of the characters at all. The movies actually angered me, as well, because I am a very harsh critic when it comes to books being made into movies—what a disaster Divergent was!—and it bothered me that they lessened Bilbo’s importance and changed many events. Perhaps that’s just in my nature, though, to find everything wrong with a film representation of a book, because before reading this story I thoroughly enjoyed those those movies.

That doesn’t lesson my opinion on the book, and I’d give it 3 stars.