The Hobbit, by JJR Tolkien

Last night, I finished reading this to Lady Vader, having read it to the Lord of Chaos about five years ago and having had it read to me by my late dad when I was of a similar age. I've read this book countless times, have seen the films and various versions on stage. This is the first time I've read the coo-posh Folio edition that my dad gave me and the Dr long ago one Christmas, illustrated by Eric Fraser. That was a kingly gift!

A few things strike me this time round. First, the number of times that Bilbo Baggins is referred to as "queer", Tolkien of course meaning strange or eccentric. I don't think I've ever seen a reading of Bilbo as gay but there are various bits of circumstantial evidence here and The Lords of the Rings to support it. That in turn informs a story about close male friendships, through thick and thin.

The older I get, the more fascinated I am by Gandalf, this benign, wise figure trying to sort out a hundred different bits of shit all at once. Having never had much interest in the expanded lore, this time I hung on all the little hints about what Gandalf gets up to after leaving Bilbo and the dwarves at Milkwood, and goes off to deal with a Necromancer. I now know from the film versions of The Hobbit what that's alluding to, which had always passed me by before. If I ever have a spare moment - not likely, mate - I'd like to know more about what Tolkien wrote about that and exactly when, given his revisions to the first edition of The Hobbit to better fit its sequels.

I was conscious, too, this time of the voice of Gandalf, which I so associate with my dad's reading and then, in respectable second place, Ian McKellen. Reading The Hobbit this time, I was also struck by the difficulty of distinguishing voices - the gruff-voiced dwarves, with the especially gruff-voiced Thorin, as distinct from gruff Beorn or gruff Bard or gruff Smaug. But on the whole this is a story that really works read aloud. The only thing, I think, that benefits from seeing the words on the page is all the riddling with Golem. There, for the reader to play along, it helps to pick back over the words as one might scrutinise the clues in a crossword.

But whereas The Lords of the Rings is about a fellowship of disparate characters, all very different and distinct, the main cast of The Hobbit is harder to distinguish.