The Hobbit, re-read

Following up on last month's post about The Hobbit movie disaster, I took a little time this past week to re-read The Hobbit.  As always, it's a delight to go back through that book and enjoy it all over again.  If you've never read it, or especially if you've had the misfortune to have only seen the movies, you owe it to yourself to dig into this book.

Then, as with potato chips, one thing leads to another and now I've launched into a re-read of Lord of the Rings.  This one will take a bit longer.  Reading the intro chapters, it was interesting to see how Tolkien's retconning of certain small aspects of The Hobbit between editions were, by him, attributed to Bilbo's coming under The Ring's influence.  The most significant of these revolve around upgrading a simple turn-you-invisible prop in The Hobbit into The One Ring in LotR, and are discussed in some depth in The Road to Middle Earth.  Anyway, it was a nice twist by Tolkien to attribute the retconning of various editions of The Hobbit into being a malevolent effect upon Bilbo of The One Ring's reality distortion field.

It's a nice day here, so that's all for now.  Time to go out and have adventures of my own.