Over Hill and Dale

Over the last two months or so I've been reading The Hobbit to Stacy and the kids before bed and over Christmas break we finished it up. Though the movement in our reading selections has been steadily trending in this direction, this was nevertheless a watershed book for us -- a book I enjoyed reading just as much as they enjoyed hearing it. As I said, it's been a positive-trending progression and the convergence was becoming more clear. We'd been reading a lot of the Boxcar Children series, which the kids love, but I'm getting way tired of. Alice in Wonderland, a book I've always enjoyed, was lukewarmly received by my finicky audience a few months back. (Still a little too weird, I guess.) The first two Narnia books were big hits with the kids, but I've read them so many times that, while I still enjoyed them, they weren't as exciting for me as for them. Things started to warm up for both of us with The Wizard of Oz this fall, and finally, with jolly old Bilbo, things burst into flame.

It wasn't an immediate score. We read in fairly short snippets. If we can read an entire chapter in one sitting, that's great, but all-in-all rare. Our bedtime schedule usually dictates that we divide chapters up into two or three chunks. The first chapter of the Hobbit, where Bilbo meets Gandalf and they pretty much just sit around blowing smoke rings was a little light on adventure, and even when the dwarves started showing up the kids didn't seem to be locked and loaded. I contemplated a year or two's shelving those first couple of nights, but luckily once Tolkien's dwarves started making mayhem on poor Bilbo's pantry, the squawks and squeals from our own dwarves told me we were set for take-off.

What a great adventure it was! N is proving to be a map-fiend like his father, so every night we'd pull out the map and retrace our steps. Mr. Navigator N would remind us all of the paths trodden and speculate on the paths forward. L was always piecing together the plot twists and turns and would inevitably come to some conclusion as to what would have to happen next a paragraph or two before she was to be proven right. (It was a little unsettling actually. She's going to find Agatha Christie quite dull, I'm afraid.) I'm not sure if I inadvertently spilled the beans, or the cobwebs shown on the maps tipped them off, but the biggest anticipation of the entire book was the meeting with the giant spiders in creepy Mirkwood, and it did not fail to deliver its expected delight. The kids suffered through a week of nightmares, yet I believe they would still hold that to be their favorite part of the book. N still screams "Attercop" (Bilbo's taunt to the spiders) at anything and everything he wants to infuriate (and that's a pretty long list).

Side note: I did some research on "attercop" and found out it wasn't just a made-up word that Tolkien created for Bilbo to tease the spiders. Though now archaic, it comes from Old and Middle English words for spider, being made up of the pieces "atter" or poison, and "cop" or head. Evidently attercop was not an uncommon word and was still used until recently in rural areas of Yorkshire. (Supposedly the Norwegian word for spider is still very similar -- "edderkopp.") This is were we get the "cob" in "cobwebs." Sorry for the digression, but I found that fascinating.

But to make a long story a little less long, the kids were drawn in and focused for the rest of the story. They were thrilled by the spiders, fascinated by Beorn and the eagles, and positively in awe of Smaug, the dragon. They contemplated aloud whether Bilbo did the right thing in taking the Arkenstone, and were quite upset at the final demise of the dwarves Thorin, Fili and Kili. (From the very beginning Fili and Kili were N's favorites because "they were the youngest.")

I'm not sure how to follow up this one. We cracked open Treasure Island last night, but I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew with that one. At the end of the first chapter N was ready to continue; he just bounces over the general concepts, so the details of the prose don't concern him too much. But L was frustrated; she's following word for word now, and there were a lot of details and nuance that she just couldn't get. Heck, I don't get half the nautical lingo. I'm thinking a shelving might be in order, though I don't know what to pick up in its place.

Any suggestions?