Despite my hairy feet, I've never been welcome in the Shire

So I have a confession to make.

I have never read The Hobbit.

No.
That’s not true.

I tried to read The Hobbit.

It was fourth grade, probably March-ish. Andrew, my nemisis of elementary school, had gone too far, I’d gone too far, and we’d wound up in “chats”.

I don’t know how else to put it. He’d pulled my hair and pinched my sides enough times that I’d railed off and clocked him, and we’d landed ourselves in what I can only call a mandatory, stuporvised conversation that happened once a week.

Anyways, Andrew thought the best olive branch he could offer was to call me a poor reader and make himself look better.

”The Hobbit is a 6th grade reading level and I can read it in less than 4 days,” he insisted, and I’d never been more incised by anything in my short life. How dare he! Sure, yeah, it’d taken me 3 weeks to get halfway through The Secret of Nihm, but good god, have you tried to read that thing? And then there’s the fact that I only read it while at school, in SSR, which was only something like 25 minutes long, and half the time I was too busy inhaling The Baby Sitter’s Club book that I’d bought for a dollar and a half at the Tin Can Mailman and he didn’t know that I was reading 2 or 3 books a night every night when I got home after doing my homework! How dare that little mongrel assume I’m below a 6th grade reading level!

I hated him with all the fury a 9 year old could harbor. I pretty much hated him all the way through school, which is kind of a shame because he really wasn’t a bad guy, just a jock stuck in a nerd’s body, back when a nerd was a bad thing to be. He was basically Bart in that one episode where he had the lazy eye and the screwy spine and his mom dressed him like Milhouse.

So anyways, since we were fourth graders in the 4-5th split class, making us nerdy little goody too shoes, it was really easy for us to get clearance to go to the library. I’m actually sure that it was probably the only time we’d ever had the same opinion about anything. We dashed into the library, into the corner behind the podium with the dictionary that had all the dirty words scratched out of it, and he grabbed the white book with the blue and green filigree around the edges off the cover, handed it to me proudly, and actually seemed genuinely overjoyed that he might have someone else in his life he could talk about it with.

Looking back, he probably had a pretty huge crush on me.

Anyways, that same day, I sat down at SSR and was pleasantly excited about reading it.

The book had me at the first sentence, I’d resisted the urge to read the last sentence (like grade schoolers do, you know, stupid tests to see if it’s going to be a good or a bad book?), and yay fantasy!

.
.
.

I made it maybe 4 pages.

Or maybe I made farther, but it was that a single sentence had run-on for 4 pages? Shit, it’s been nearly 20 years.

Whatever it was, I distinctly remember slogging through the descriptions of all the inane shit Bilbo had on his bookshelf, appalled at the run-on sentences because apparently I was a grammar nazi even at 9 years old, and what the fuck importance did any of this shit have to the story in the first place?! I didn’t even finish the sentence I’d been slogging through. I just opened my desk, flung the book into the recesses, grabbed The Secret of Nihm, and hated Andrew more for having horrible taste in books.