A reluctant adventurer goes in search of a dragon's gold, rescuing his Dwarven friends and getting his hands on a magic ring along the way.

Once again, I was reading this book out loud to a young listener, as my kids come of age for this sort of story. Despite the breaking of the fourth wall, it’s great as an introduction to fantasy, as its point of reference is an innocent character who gets dragged into an uncomfortable situation. By the time we get to the battle with the dragon and the goblins at the end, the reader has had a lot of experience with events getting less comfortable and more dangerous. Not only that, but Bilbo goes from being completely out of place and a burden to the hero, several times. His annoyance at the lack of gratitude by the dwarves, or the finicky nature of it, was hilarious.

The book is a classic, and has a lot of amazing elements. It introduced us to Hobbits and Middle-Earth, grew into something so much better than it was. Unfortunately, the book suffers from condescension of an adult talking down to a child so often that it is distracting to the point of being annoying.

It would be easy to be biased toward this book, because weeks after reading it all the elements that made it annoying while reading it disappear into the background, and I only really remember the good parts, the heroism of Bilbo, the mysteries that are Gandalf, Gollum, elves and everything that are new to the reader, and which set the stage for The Lord of the Rings, and its connection to The Silmarillion.

I reread this book after seeing the first two movies of the trilogy. I was amazed to see how much of the stuff I thought was filler in the first movie was actually directly translated from the book! Oops. In general, I think the movie improved on some of the book, left alone what was already good, but didn't quite remove enough of the other stuff.

When Bilbo gets recruited by Gandalf and the dwarves, I've always disliked the intrusion, even though it ended up being good for him. It is bullying, but typical of these kinds of stories, and I think there would be other ways to get him up and out of the world. But they certainly wouldn't make for as good a story!

It was actually kind of fun to explain things to my young listener about the history of Middle-Earth, since I know so much more about it than the book lets on, and to see his eyes absorb everything in wonder. The spider scenes were among the most memorable (strangely shortened to almost non-existence in the movies), and he laughed a lot during the introduction to Beorn.

I often wonder if Tolkien would have rewritten the tale differently if he could have, after The Lord of the Rings was published. By then it was way too late, of course, but would he have removed the rock giants doing battle, the coincidence of the dwarves arriving on Durin's Day (in the book nobody knows when that might be, and it never bothers them) or arriving in Rivendell at the right time to read the invisible runes, or the thrush that could talk to Bard?

Since the book is written almost entirely from Bilbo's point of view, it is not surprising that we get almost nothing of the Battle of Five Armies, as he is knocked out, but Tolkien could have spent more time on it as he did in Laketown, to which Bilbo was not an observer, either. As with the death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring, the movie does justice to the deaths of Thorin, Fili and Kili, where the book barely touches on them.

Regardless of its faults, there is a lot of magic in this book, and not all by the wizard. I mean that it manages to surpass all the small parts and become something bigger. No wonder people wanted to hear more about Hobbits after reading this. After everything, despite what the movie says about the Ring at the end, Bilbo returns home changed for the better, and I don't think the Ring had a hold on him at that time.

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