The Mysterious Book Society - The Hobbit

Hello and welcome to the first publication of the Mysterious Book Society (MBS???), don’t worry, it really is not that mysterious, the name comes from the book series The Mysterious Benedict Society and since we are a book review publication I thought that it was necessary to have a book related name. Believe me I went through several names before coming up with our name - these include Emma’s Hole in the Ground Book Reviews as a Hobbit reference or Emma’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Book Reviews for Mary Poppins but I thought about it and realized that those were both terrible so here we are with a slightly better name. To get into the real business, this is a book review article, the first of a long series. I will try to write as much as possible for our lovely little blog because it is one of my major hobbies to talk about books (that said if talking about something can be a hobby) so check back frequently for more reviews. Today we will be talking about The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien.

Information about the book -

Title: The Hobbit

Author: J.R.R Tolkien

Genre: Fantasy

Series: The Lord of The Rings

Volume Number: Prequal

Rating: 4.5 stars

I thought that this book was very good, a classic fantasy adventure, the unexpecting hero, the wise old wizard. This book is interesting and fun to read, most adventure stories take a long time to set up and can be dull for a while, (once I read a book series that took three full books to finally finish setting up the story!) The Hobbit though was quick to cut to the chase taking only three chapters to get into the adventure. The adventure itself was fun to read as the author never let the reader get bored, the author is always making something happen. If you have not read this book before I definitely think you should, this book as well as the rest of it’s series is a timeless classic for all readers.

A Deeper Dive

In this section of the review I would like to deeply dive into the book and talk about the events in it, this means that the book will obviously be spoiled so unless you have already read the book or really just don’t care I advise that you read no further.

So The Hobbit was a great book but I would like to talk about why I liked it more specifically. For starters I loved how Tolkien set up Bilbo’s home and life, he did a great job expressing what Bilbo did, how he was received in his community and his home. That whole part of the book flows nicely and it is giving the right amount of detail, not so much that it is overwhelming but not so little that you cannot understand the full extent of what is happening. I said above that Tolkien keeps the novel moving along, in the third chapter they are already escaping trolls! Altogether my favorite part of this book was definitely when Bilbo does a riddle competition with Gollum in the deepest of goblin caves after being captured. I thought it was fun to try and figure out some of the answers to them before reading them. The way that Gollum was portrayed also made that reading portion very enjoyable. I have read this book twice now, the first time was when I was in fourth grade, we were reading it for my class altogether. After reading it my teacher gave everyone one specific thing to focus on, she wanted us to figure out why our designated object or idea was portrayed in the story and why it was important. I remember two objects that were presented, my own which was good and evil and one of my classmates which was Bilbo’s chair. I thought that these would be good to bring up because they are both important things and ideas in the story. For example with good and evil the author makes it very obvious what is good and what is not. After escaping the goblin caves after being captured they get attacked by evil wolves and more goblins but then rescued by the eagles (If you have not read the book that will make no sense, sorry.) The only creature that the lines of good and evil were truly blurred would probably be Gollum, he shows that Gollum is not the best creature in the caves but that he is just trying to survive. The author also makes a big point on how he has been alone for decades. With the chair I thought that it was referring to comfort and home which adds a lot of emotion to the story which is very good. So all and all I thought that this was a great book and I would definitely recommend.

Wrap Up

To conclude I thought that this was a very good book well worth a read. It can be found in our school library for anyone who wishes to read it.

“I cannot imagine life without books”

-Thomas Jefferson

Article By - Emma Dyer