The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (4 stars)

Quick, movie's out, read the book again! Since Peter Jackson chose to stretch one small children's book into 3 long movies it turns out you can easily read the book chapters covered by the movie faster than you can watch the movie, and reading the whole book only takes a few hours.

As a children's book I think it is pretty damn good. You can see Tolkien building up ideas for Lord of the Rings: the easily-killed but numerous spiders are the building blocks for the much more sinister and powerful Shelob, the swords taken from the trolls were very reminiscent of the swords acquired from the Barrow-wight and used to kill the Nazgul, and the Battle of Five Armies is a smaller scale template for the epic battle of Helm's Deep.

On a less positive note, I found the foreshadowing fairly annoying, and I'm not sure why it is there. Maybe Tolkien thought kids needed to be reassured that everything was going to work out in the end, or needed all the dots explicitly connected?

...which shows he was a wise elf and wiser than the men of the town, though not quite right, as we shall see in the end.

...And the knotted ropes are too slender for my weight. Luckily for him that was not true, as you will see.

Great children's book, and I'm going to score it as such, I certainly loved it as a kid.

4 stars.