This is a post about rereading The Hobbit in two different ways.
First, I don’t think I ever actually linked to the chapter-by-chapter reread I did over at Tor.com in 2012-2013, with revisits for the movies, and one more post coming, obviously. (I did The Lord of the Rings, too, over a much longer time.)
Second, Chad and I have just read it out loud to SteelyKid (who turned six over the summer and is in first grade). We alternated nights, and started out with Chad reading odd-numbered chapters and I reading even, but then Chad combined chapters 13 and 14 and so we switched even-odd status for the rest of the book.
It was so much fun, reading it to her. Her attention did drift a bit during long descriptive passages—generally she’s reading books that are more heavily illustrated than my childhoold coffee-table-sized hardcover with pictures from the Rankin-Bass animated adaptation, so she has more to occupy her. (Also, reading illustrated books, as opposed to picture books, introduces the problem of spoilers—and not just when she flips ahead, either, but when they put the most dramatic image of the chapter at the front no matter where it falls in the chapter.) But she paid enough attention to notice things like Thorin not being captured by the spiders being signalled clearly throughout the chapter, which I personally never noticed until the reread project, and was involved enough to want to interrupt for long discussions of why not this method or that method to kill Smaug. I was also surprised to find that all the songs I read went very smoothly out loud, even the ridiculous elf tra-la-la-lally ones. (Some of the chapters were really pushing the limits of bedtime, though, in the vicinity of 45 minutes or so, in case you’re thinking of doing this yourself.)
We’re not reading her LotR any time soon, because clearly she’s not ready for it, but I can definitely say that first grade is a dandy time to read The Hobbit.
(Chad showed her the Rankin-Bass movie, which I don’t get the impression she was very enamored of, and which I still have never seen. Afterward she asked him if she could see the new ones now, because she’d heard them mentioned on the radio. He said no.)
Actually, she liked the Rankin-Bass movie a good deal, and enjoyed pointing out stuff that was coming up, or sort of indirectly done. It suffered a bit from being split to avoid The Pip seeing it, though.
Ah, thanks. I didn’t want to ask her too much about it lest His Pipliness get interested (it’s too long and probably too scary for him).
Hmm. My daughter’s two years older than SteelyKid, and I was wondering whether *she’d* be up to it.
(Probably yes: we just finished “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in combined bedtime and independent reading, which she enjoyed, but it’s the point where the series takes a fairly hard left turn into darker and more adult, political content, and I sense that for a little while she’d probably rather re-read the earlier books than press on. But I think that’s a harder slog than “The Hobbit.”)
Matt, if she could get through _Goblet of Fire_, I am positive she could get through _The Hobbit_. Though she might pick up on more of the darkness than SK did.