The Hobbit, Real Talk

The Hobbit is a quintessential fantasy novel by the great J.R.R Tolkien. Its episodic storytelling style makes it a great coffee table book for any fantasy enthusiast.  Tonight’s blog post will be a little different. It isn’t about The Hobbit; it’s about how this book in particular affected my life as a reader.

            Let’s dive in shall we? I have dyslexia. To this day I still can't spell my way out of a paper bag. I attribute all my spelling success to the red squiggles that help keep me in check. You would be horrified at the amount of red squiggles on the screen right now. I’ll fix those in a bit. Regardless, I love reading. (I read about 1 book every week and a half.) When I was a kid I vehemently despised reading.  This book flipped my perspective.

            As a child, I had a tutor who would come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for 2 hours. I’d scatter like a spotted cockroach every time I heard the ominous ring of the doorbell. After 5 or so minutes of fruitless struggling, I’d be seated in the kitchen with her and we would crack open a book. One day she looked at me with a sly grin,

            “Jack, I have a new book for today’s lesson that I think you’ll enjoy,” she says.

I grunt.  Reading fun? How could reading ever be fun? I think. She reaches into her worn leather purse and pulls out a book. This book was stained with use.  Its pages were worn and flimsy. The book had been smashed, bent, mangled, spilled on and yet it still functioned.  Intrigued by its aesthetics, I took a peak at the book laid before me. The Hobbit, was written across the cover.

            As soon as we started reading it together I was enchanted. I have always been a gamer and this was the perfect book for a young geek. When we finished the novel I became obsessed with Lord of the Rings.  It had such a huge impact on me that during my senior year of high school I wrote a 40-page paper about the allegorical themes surrounding Tolkien’s universe.

            I couldn’t be more grateful, it opened the door to R.A Salvatore, Stephen King, Greg Keyes, and a whole spectrum of other great writers.  Cheers!!! :)

-Jack