I liked The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien SO much more than I thought I would! In the past, I'd had bad experiences with Hobbit-related things, so I had really low expectations for the book. For example, when I was in elementary school, I tried reading it because my dad told me he thought I'd like it... I found it really boring though, and I never finished it. Then, when The Lord of the Rings movies came out, I tried watching those and also found them even more boring. Then the two Hobbit movies were released. I watched the second one, The Desolation of Smaug, with my dad, and I still found it super boring. However, it was available as an audiobook, and I figured it would be easier to listen to the book than actually read it because then I could listen to it while I worked on menial tasks and kill two birds with one stone. So I decided to give it a try. I was really glad I did because I loved this book! I wouldn't say it's in the top five books of all time, but it was really good. The vibe of this book seemed completely different from the second Hobbit movie. This book was adventurous and had a good vibe of camaraderie. The movie was really lacking the heart that the book had. I've never read the Lord of the Rings books, but I saw parts of the movies, and The Desolation of Smaug movie reminded me too much of the LOTR movies...in a bad way, because they were super drawn out with boring characters who lacked personality. I think they did this on purpose to make the story more manly so that they could appeal to people who like manly action movies, which is tons of people. Like maybe if the movie had too much cutesiness it would only appeal to really dorky fantasy reading people. But I would have liked it better this way! I kept falling asleep during the movie. The book was super interesting! The only part of the movie that I liked was the barrel scene, even though it was really different from the barrel scene in the book, which wasn't crazy and action-packed like it was in the movie. I found a fun video about how they made the scene, if you're interested. It looks like the most fun scene to film ever:
Anyway, like I said, the parts of The Hobbit that appealed to me, and the parts of The Hobbit that appealed to the movie director were completely different I guess. For me, I really liked the parts with the character interactions and descriptions of their feelings and personalities. I loved the descriptions of Bilbo. He was adorably polite, like in the very beginning when people kept coming into his house, and he would serve them food and drinks and try to be really polite, while in his head he was worrying that he would run out of food. He ended up serving them the little cakes that he had been planning on eating later that day for lunch. Little details like that were my favorite parts of the book.
To me, the funniest part of the book was in Chapter 7, when Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves went to Beorn's house, but they didn't want to upset Beorn with all the people, so Gandalf told the dwarves to enter two at a time, every five minutes, and say something along the lines of "We are pleased to be of service to you." But it ended up not really working out that well and just being really awkward. I didn't describe it in a funny way, but in the book it was super funny!
On many occasions, Tolkien did that thing where he kind of breaks the fourth wall and says something like, "But that's another story that we won't talk about here." I remember at one point, there was a chapter that ended with something like, "But then the hobbit realized... this part of his story had to continue in the next chapter!" I thought these things were cute. I had seen them a lot in other books, but the other books I saw it in were more recent, so it made me wonder if Tolkien was the first to do this or if he had just seen it in other books too and decided to adopt it.
I'm sure that people already know about this and are tired of hearing about it, but I guess I may as well bring up the fact that this book is strongly reminiscent of the hero's journey. There are tons of stories that have it (e.g. Harry Potter and The Lion King), but it seemed to be even stronger in this book. I didn't mind this. It's not a boring plot structure and the actual events and characters were original. It kind of reminded me of The Lego Movie because Emmett was like Bilbo in some ways. They were really simple people who weren't particularly strong or amazing but still lovable because it made it easier for us commonfolk to relate to them.
In conclusion, this book had such a good vibe to it that the movie was totally lacking. It gave me a similar mood to the mood that I get around Christmastime, or when I go on the (now gone!!) Maelstrom ride at Disneyworld, or when I watch Labyrinth, or read the first few Harry Potter books. It made me feel like baking cookies and bread, and watching claymation movies, and building blanket forts, and going out to enjoy nature. I'm pretty sure this is really different from how a lot of people feel when they read the book, considering the nature of the movies. Maybe I should give the animated movie a try!
I think this scene would have been even better with this song!
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