Several months ago I decided to reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It had been a few years since I last read The Hobbit, and maybe 8-10 since I read LOTR. My memory of the details was getting rusty, and since so many writing websites take their examples from books I haven’t read or movies I haven’t seen, regrounding myself in one of the few popular stories I have read seemed like a good idea.

Now, I don’t have much time to sit down and read, so even though I have all of the books in paperback, my first thought was “I’ll borrow the audiobooks from the library.”

This is where I made a mistake. Instead of looking them up on my library’s website, I looked them up in Overdrive. My library service had access to two versions of each title, a BBC dramatization, and an American dramatization. I placed holds the BBC versions, because Tolkien was English, and English accents are awesome.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. In the meantime, I came up with the idea to write book reviews for this blog. I read The Three Musketeers and The Silmarillion. I wrote their reviews.

When I finally got The Hobbit, it was awesome. It also wasn’t an audiobook. Instead, I had checked out a radio broadcast adaptation, which simply would not do. These are supposed to be book reviews, damn it! But in the end, I thought the broadcast was worth writing about too. So I finished the broadcast, took some notes, and then read my paperback.

Any time I start The Lord of the Rings, I feel obligated to read the whole trilogy—which is why I’ve only read it once in its entirety. Not so with The Hobbit. I can read one book and then move on to something else. It isn’t as big of a commitment, and I appreciate that. This is at least my third time reading it, maybe my fourth or fifth—I don’t remember.

I used to tell people interested in The Lord of the Rings to check out The Hobbit first, but as I’ve been rereading the books this time, I realize that LOTR and The Hobbit have some important differences that could make them appeal to different people. Today I’m going to get into some of the features of The Hobbit, who might like it, and who would do better to go straight to LOTR.