REVIEW: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Title: The Hobbit
Series: none
Author: John Ronald Ruel Tolkien
Published Date: September 21, 1937 (original)
Publisher: George Allen and Unwin (Original)
Format: ebook
Pages: 195
ISBN: 0618260307
Copy provided by: myself
Genre: high fantasy
Add to: Goodreads
Purchase: Amazon / Barnes and Noble
Rating: 5 stars

Synopsis: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent.

My review: I would love to thank my uncle for introducing me to this wonderful classic book. In anyone's library, you can see what kind of a person they are based on the titles, and his library was full of religious textbooks, educational textbooks, psychological textbooks, with a smattering of my dad's books of history in there. There were only 4 books in the entire 1000+ book library (I am not kidding), that were anything near fiction, and those were The Hobbit and the hard cover trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. Not even CS Lewis (a very famous theologian as well as the author of the Narnia books) found his way into that library in his Chronicles of Narnia. 
I've seen other reviews complaining about how long and winding the author's descriptions are. And they are. But, I have not had another book or author describe giant spiders and their webs in such detail that I was shuddering as I was reading. I'm terrified of spiders, and that part of the book had my heart racing. It was like I was there with Bilbo in that awful Mirkwood forest with those horrible arachnids, instead of walking down to the security office in my building trying to get a new ID.
And as much of a jerk as Thorin was to Bilbo towards the end, I still cried at the end. And I especially cried when I found out that my two favorite dwarves don't make it. I know I've read this before and I knew they wouldn't, but I guess I was hoping that they would magically make it this time.

The youngest of the dwarven company, Fili and Kili