alexiacambaling's reviews
442 reviews

I will try again some time. Eureka (ugh, what's up with her name?) is so boring and utterly lifeless (no pun intended) that I cannot stand her form more than an hour.

The Hobbit has always been one of those books I've always thought I should read. I've been wanting to get into Tolkien's work for a long time before I caved and finally bought The Hobbit on the Kindle store. I should have gotten a paper copy. This is something I don't think about a lot or rather, I don't think this way for the majority of books I read on my iPad. With The Hobbit, however, I started to get bogged down by the fact that I was reading it on a device.

The Hobbit is dense. Tolkien's writing is full of descriptions of places, languages, and people. Sometimes, the action feels almost like an afterthought. I know The Hobbit is supposed to be a children's book so I didn't expect it to be like those books I read today. However, having a paper copy would have allowed me to highlight and make notes on the paper so I could feel more engaged. I feel like reading it the way I did kind of took away from my enjoyment of the story.

The story was fine, if unconventional in some ways. The way it was told was kind of matter-of-fact but I nevertheless enjoyed the structure. Mostly, it's the narrator describing how Bilbo the hobbit got in an adventure, managed to get into shenanigans, but was able to save himself in the end. It's clear that Tolkien's strength is worldbuilding, not storytelling from the way he describes his world and narrates the story. The story could have been more interesting if the writing was a bit less dry, I think.

Bilbo's adventures were pretty fun if you run through the sequence of events without paying much attention to how it was written. He manages to get himself in and out of a lot of difficult situations, and manages to befriend the dwarves who were originally annoyed by him. In the end, he makes friends with the lot of them, although I felt like he never managed not to be the odd one out in the group. That fact certainly served him well at times, though.

I honestly thought that the last 35+ pages or so would be anticlimactic and I would be disappointed at the lack of action near the end but I was wrong. I hadn't seen the movies, I didn't know it was going to happen. However, Tolkien managed to surprise me and pulled it off in a pretty interesting way. The manner in which it was described can read out of a history book if you took out Bilbo. The end, with Bilbo safely back in his hobbit hole, telling stories with old friends was heartwarming and a perfect conclusion to their adventure.

I think in the end, I don't have a lot of qualms with dry text. Just some when I start to remember what I'm reading is a story, not a biography or a history book. It's still readable. It's just that if I'm reading something that's drier than usual, with more geographical descriptions than it needs, I'm better off reading it with a pen and a highlighter. Will I reread this? Yes. Will I still read the Lord of the Rings? Yes, but I'll read it and the rest of Tolkien's works with paper books.

I honestly didn't know how I'd rate this book. It started out really strong, but I found that the parts with Nynaeve and Elayne dragged, along with Egwene in T'A'R. I guess I couldn't care about Nynaeve and Elayne hunting Black Ajah and Egwene really started to annoy me with how bratty she is.

Despite that, I liked this book. There's a lot of things that really drives the plot and how the characters developed. Seeing Rand's POV again was really great in terms of seeing how he's changing and how his abilities are starting to weigh on him, as well as the prophecies. We really get to see him get more powerful, but at the same time we see the taint starting to affect him. We also learn who Rand's parents were and I liked the scenes where he acknowledged it.

We also get to see the Two Rivers and Emond's Field again. I actually looked forward to the scenes there a lot since it hasn't been "seen" since the first book and I wanted to see what happened to it. I liked those best because we start to see these peaceful farmer folk accept that their lives have changed and they have to adapt. Also, that scene with Aram was pretty sad, even if it was so short, it did have a lot of impact.

Mat seems to be coming into his own as well. There's definitely something going on with him, something that would make him someone other than a gambler. Mat is certainly a hero in this story and I expect his arc to develop a lot more.

I don't want to spoil more but as usual, I enjoyed how detailed the book was, and how everything develops. There's a lot more world building and lore in this book and both are welcome, especially since how it was delivered was handled well.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book and seeing how things develop further from here.