Title: [The Hobbit: Pocket Edition]
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 1937/2011
276 pages
This is an attractive little hardback pocket edition. The type, though small, is very clear, and there's something fun about a hobbit-sized book.
This was a re-read of The Hobbit, which I first read at 7 years old. It was the second chapter book I read, and my first adult novel in terms of vocabulary and themes. I reread it several times as a child and adolescent, then not again in its entirety until now. Having read better books in subsequent years--for example, books with any female characters whatsoever--I still admire its role in the genre, the shadowy evidence of Tolkien's scholarship in philology and northern epics, and the ways in which this is a bildungsroman about going to war and longing for home. The return home elides over larger problems, such as what Bilbo might do with this Ring. Fortunately, Tolkien took care of that little plot element elsewhere.
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