Some time ago, my youngest (9 years old) expressed an interest in Tolkien books.  This was no doubt because of the success of the recent Lord of the Rings movies, and so I told him that we should read The Hobbit together.  I’d never read it and so thought it would be good for me also.

Nowadays, everyone knows the story fairly well, or at the very least the characters.  It’s difficult to block out the film’s influences over our imagination, though because the main characters were different in The Hobbit, it is not impossible.