The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien singled out the word CUTE and started fantasizing about it until a book called The Hobbit came into being. Mostly we are used to mighty magical creatures living in magnificently magical world. Tolkien thought: but what about the fantasy of living in secluded peaceful communities, free from the worries of the world, not trying hard to behave intelligently to make your way into the world, wearing bright clothes, eating six times a day, living in comfortable places having bedrooms, bathrooms, lots of pantries, wardrobes and even rooms devoted to clothes, kitchens (yes, that is a plural), dining rooms (here is another one), all on the same floor (so that there nothing as inconvenient as stairs) and spending your time eating and cooking and eating again and smoking and singing and what a great thing it would be if all this could be done without having to worry about shoes (only some people like me can understand this bit of fantasy). All this IS fantasy. If that could exist in the real world, then even I could be a hobbit. So what if "there is little or no magic about them", they still exist in some ancient, magical, unreal world.

The accommodation described above had just one little inhabitant Bilbo Baggins. I can give all the stars to this book for just this one character, The Hobbit. As Bilbo Baggins was spending just another day of his life, he had an encounter with the wizard Gandalf, who was known to be involved in great adventures and therefore was not liked much in the hobbit community who valued the quiet and peace. So Bilbo did not act as graciously as he was used to. While Bilbo had only  a lowly opinion of adventures of any kind, Gandalf was probably having a private joke with himself about dragging the cute, comfort loving and dinner loving hobbit out into the roughest of adventures:

"We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them." (Bilbo Baggins)

But Gandalf was not someone who could be so easily "good-morninged" by a hobbit so he gets himself invited to tea at Bilbo's house and thought it was quite prudent to overwhelm the little hobbit into getting employed in an adventure by a party of thirteen dwarves that unceremoniously arrived at the appointed tea time (offering their own services and asking the hobbit to cook all sorts of delicacies for them). Now Bilbo found himself dragged into being a "Burglar". The dwarves were robbed of their kingdom by a dragon and now they employed a burglar to rob the dragon itself. After a lot of mayhem at Bilbo's house, they set upon the adventure.

The adventure is action packed, full of blunders, full of grumping, bickering and blaming and a number of battles they had to fight together against hunger and dark among other even more deadly enemies. Tolkien has managed to include all sorts of magical and fantastical creatures in the story. First the party encounters trolls and our little hobbit, unable to figure out what to do, went pick-pocketing a troll and got cornered as a result. Then they were met by cruel goblins and Bilbo had an episode of riddles with a creature called Gollum, from whom he stole the invisibility ring. After somehow escaping the goblins, they were surrounded by wolves and then rescued by eagles. They also visited a community of friendly elves, where they got their strength back after resting for days and replenished their food supplies. After that they become prisoners of some less friendly wood-elves and finally reach their destination via a barrel-riding adventure. There were a great many events in the adventure and slowly Bilbo Baggins gained the respect of the dwarves, having saved their necks on a number of occasions. So now they faced the dragon and although it was quite unexpected but the dragon got itself killed by someone outside the party and the dwarves found themselves the masters of their kingdom again. Yet, it was not so simple. There was a war brewing up and here Bilbo Baggins played his role in trying to avoid the war, resulting in banishment from the party by angry, greedy dwarves. At the end, he only wanted to return to his quiet life and did not care much for the wealth that the dwarves had promised him for his services.

So Bilbo Baggins returns a hero and a changed man, having faced and overcome great hardships that other hobbits could not even imagine. Though he found, to his dismay, that his house was being auctioned by his hobbit relatives who thought him deceased, he again settled comfortably in his former life style.

"He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said 'Poor old Baggins!' and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long."

I have a long-standing problem with the genre of fantasy: I keep comparing it with Harry Potter series. Chronicles of Narnia did not live up to the standard and neither has The Hobbit. The Hobbit has humor, history, action, magical creatures, songs and riddles and wisdom which sum up to be all the necessary ingredients of children's literature. But unlike Harry Potter series, the book does not have a strong plot. There are no intelligently woven details or mystery or suspense that could make the reader voraciously read till the end. It is not a page-turner. It was just a series of adventures. They were all interesting but a bit tiring to read one after the other. I liked the first few an the last few chapters very much but the middle of the story was just too much adventure for my taste. Most of all I liked the characters. None of the characters was perfect or extraordinary (except Gandalf perhaps) but they still made their way through the adventure, not without mistakes and imperfections but they still managed it.