60. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

beautiful paperback from
my wife's adolescence

I convinced my daughter that this could be our night-time reading book and I'm so glad I did.  I was a giant Tolkien nerd back in the day.  I read Lord of the Rings three times by the time I was 13. The back cover of one of the paperback books of the trilogy with the picture of Tolkien tore off and I taped it inside my school binder with the words "My Hero" under it.  I realized, though, that The Hobbit had been kind of neglected in my memory.  Partly because I watched the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings which kind of underwhelmed me (and the constant swelling music annoyed the shit out of me) and thus skipped the Hobbit remake.  I also worry about what I am terming "Youth Narrative Overload" which is the phenomenon of children today being spoonfed endless fantasy narratives.  We had Lord of the Rings, the Sword of Shannara and a few others here and there.  The nerds growing up and taking over media has been good in a lot of ways, but also churned out a kajillion movies and series, driven mainly by the Harry Potter craze.  When my daughter was younger, we let her watch one episode on Netflix every morning and by the time she was like 8, she had seen so many series with a scrappy adventuring party going on a quest to fight some existential evil that I worried any sense of wonder and imagination had been burned out of her brain.  So I was very pleased that we could go back to the ur-text that started it all.

My own memory was that The Hobbit was good but a bit slight.  Wow, was I wrong.  First of all, it is not just good, it is still outstanding, arguably a masterpiece that holds up today in the crowded field of fantasy adventure.  And it is actually quite epic.  I had completely forgotten the ending.  For me, though, what makes fantasy work is not the epic, not the giant battles and crazy powers, but the subtle moments that evoke in the reader a feeling of being in another world, that adventure is just around the corner in your own even.  This is what Tolkien does so well in The Hobbit.  He creates a very likable, sedate character in Bilbo Baggins with just the slightest hints that a few generations back on one side of his family, there may have been some more feisty characters. And then we get these dwarves who disrupt his life and it isn't until about a quarter of the way through the book that you realize how serious the adventure actually is.  And though there is the main storyline of the dwarves trying to get their treasure back from Smaug and the even broader backstory of good people being pushed out by evil, the real story is Bilbo himself and how he ends up as Gandalf predicted being the major player and honestly somewhat of a badass.

I did find the ending where all of a sudden the narrative widens to include human politics and a massive regional power struggle to feel a bit arbitrary (especially with how Smaug is dispatched) and thus render the overall narrative less pure somehow.  As a world-building nerd, I loved it at the time and get now how it fits into the later Lord of the Rings narrative, just pointing out that it mars somewhat the unities that are so well constructed in the first three-quarters of the book.

This is a classic and I implore any of you with kids reading Harry Potter to try and get them to go back and read this one.  It moves surprisingly fast given that it was written in 1937.  But this is where it all began, I am sure there are many antecedents but it is The Hobbit where we get so many core fantasy tropes today: adventuring party, humanoid races, levelling up, magic items, dragons as the main boss, etc.  and they are all so well done here.  Unfortunately, there is one other major flaw that is sadly also a core fantasy trope (though finally being somewhat rectified these days).  There are absolutely no female characters at all.  This is probably the biggest knock on The Hobbit and on the world of fantasy fiction in general that it was so white male. It's something to talk about, but still not a reason to not read this absolute banger.

59. The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman

Whoo boy, faithful readers will notice the significant gap between this blog post and the last one, over a month! It's not that I gave up reading, but I got over-ambitious with a non-fiction book.  It's called The Life and Death of Ancient Cities and came highly recommended but hoo boy is it slow going! I finally had to put it on pause about halfway and get into some fun reading.  On top of that, I moved over to Bluesky with all the others after the election and it's quite fun and pleasant.  I hope it survives and its model can be a future path for social media.  Unfortunately, the goodness of it is not good for my internet addiction.  Twitter was such a shit hole that I barely went there, which was great for my reading. Now I am once again getting excellent feeds on the situations in Syria, South Korea and Georgia as well as reconnecting with great book and movie nerds (and even some sports people) so it is hard to pull away.

Nevertheless, I was able to finish the final book in Pullman's misnamed Sally Lockhart series.  It might be more accurate to call it his Victorian Penny Dreadful series or something.  This last book is a spinoff which focuses on two other characters in Sally's orbit (she at this point is more of an elder statesman of adventurous, boundary-breaking characters):  Jim Taylor who started as a courier in the law firm where Sally first went and is now a globe-trotting adventurer and writer (who never actually writes) and young Adelaid who was the cockney slave to the evil nemesis of the first book.

The Tin Princess feels very much like Pullman trying to do Sabatini or other books of English people having adventures abroad and getting mixed up in European politics.  Here, Adelaide ends up marrying a prince of the tiny central European country Razkavia who discovers her in a brothel (funny how I read this after watching Anora, which has a similar plot basis though very different storyline).  He barely survives a terrorist attack in London and then learns that his brother is killed and he is next in line for the throne, so Adelaide must accompany him back to Razkavia.  She meets a young well-educated Razkavian girl (who fled because her father had been imprisoned and killed) who becomes her ally and Jim goes along as well. Razkavia produces tin which is much needed by both Austria and Germany and it is thus caught between the machinations of these two superpowers.

It's all quite preposterous but also quite fun.   Jim shows his mettle several times.  The country of Razkavia is well thought out and portrayed.  It's fun to see poor, downtrodden Adelaide reveal that she actually has the native intelligence and mettle of a sovereign.  It all could be more tightly constructed and there is a bit too much going on for it to be concluded satisfactorily.  As usual with Pullman, he does a great job constructing super loathsome antagonists but never really gives the reader the satisfaction of them getting their just deserts in a deservingly brutal way.  In this case, it is nasty and manipulative chamberlain of the royal house, Godel.

So I've finished the 4 books and enjoyed them, but they weren't quite the thrills I had hoped for.  I think the whole thing would have been better had it remained centered around Sally Lockhart and the photography studio/detective agency.  We could still have had all the same adventures but with more unity and ongoing character development.  I understand that at the time, Pullman probably wrote where the muse sent him and that is fine, just left this reader with some dangling threads.  I think the excellent trade dress by Scholastic did a good job of selling them to me and may have set my expectations a bit high.