Since my son turned six we decided that it was time to read something with more teeth in it, and talk turned to The Hobbit. I remembered some trolls, dragons, and goblins and stuff, perfect for bedtime.

So we start in. My wife and I read on alternate nights. The book rapidly becomes an unintelligible art film.

We start in medias res with the dwarves already in Bilbo's kitchen, and they make boring speeches before going to bed. There's talk of a mountain and a dragon, which sounds exciting to me. The fidgeting begins and both kids are pointedly staring at the bookshelf filled with books that contain no boring speeches, and in fact are filled with dinosaurs roaring at bedtime. There's a part with some dwarfish singing, and I try to make things more interesting with a tuneless song until my daughter yells, "No singing!" So cute. "I'm not cute! No kissing me!"

In the next scene the dwarves are in bags. Bilbo is evading three trolls while Gandalf (who is apparently not a dwarf at all, but a wizard) keeps them talking until the sun rises and turns them to stone. Apparently Gandalf hasn't found his Lord of the Rings ass-kicking stick yet. Or maybe discussion is the better part of valor.

Then there's something about Elrond and 'the last Homely House' (Rivendell?) but it's way past bedtime and we only had time for a few paragraphs. There was surprisingly little resistance to the lack of plot advancement.

Then they're on a mountain pass, and find a nice cave to sleep in after some discussion. The book we're reading is oversize with lots of stills from the cartoon version in it. This is good for keeping the boy's attention for a little more than two minutes per page, but the pages are still filled with ten minutes of text which leaves eight minutes for boredly perusing a three-month-old ripped Lego Magazine. At least they're quiet.

Next thing you know, Bilbo's in another cave talking riddles with a guy named Gollum who has apparently lost a ring which Bilbo found. The ring makes Bilbo invisible, and Gollum assumes he already knew the way out and inadvertently shows Bilbo the exit. My daughter has run off and is noisily dropping wooden blocks on the floor in another room. My son is busy sticking a Lego crab instead of a head on the Lego guy's body, which is creepier and far more interesting than riddles in the dark could ever be.

"Do you want me to stop reading this book?" I ask. "We could read something else instead."

"No, I want to read it," my son says. I have a vague memory of being a kid and humoring my parents, too. I want to explain that I'm OK with roaring dinosaurs but I have a feeling that will only have the opposite effect.

Suddenly Bilbo is being carried through the air by giant eagles (an excellent chain of grocery stores in central Pennsylvania) and they set him down where after a nap he wishes he had some breakfast. Then another eagle ride to a friend of Gandalf's named Beorn, who Gandalf says can change from a man into a bear and calls that big rock there 'Carrock'. I can only hope that this will feature prominently later in the story, but I can't for the life of me remember this bear guy from the first time I read it so it can't have been important. Where is Smaug already? Beorn has impenetrable hedgerows and keeps bees and cows. I suspect that this is a reference to the land of milk and honey and make a mental note to look that up. Later I make a new mental note not to google 'the land of milk and honey' at work and click blindly on the link for landmilkhoney.com. NSFW. I don't know what Tolkien really had in mind here, but it certainly wasn't nutritional fetishists.

Wait, where did Beorn go? The dwarves appear to have been shoved in barrels and tossed into an underground stream. They end up in Dale, a town of humans downstream, where they are revived from their incarceration and given supplies for the rest of their journey to Lonely Mountain. The children are sort of paying attention again, and do not seem surprised that Beorn has disappeared because of the malleable believability of children's imagination.

They arrive and send Bilbo down a little tunnel to check on Smaug. He steals a cup and reports back. The dragon freaks out and attacks the wall, then disappears.

Human and Elvish troops show up at the foot of the mountain. There's now a wall covering the entrance, and nobody appears to be afraid of Smaug anymore. Are the armies there to fight Smaug? Is the wall to keep Smaug out? Wait, there is another army coming, of Dwarves! And now Goblins! And Gandalf! There are snippets of conversation that allude to Smaug's death, but you'd think that was the climax of the book and here it's just a footnote.

And that's it. That's how it ends.

The experience of reading this book in little vignettes without plot continuity gave me a great opportunity to study Tolkien's writing style itself. He spends a lot of time talking to the reader, reassuring them that things will be fine or agreeing with the reader that Thorin is perhaps a bit too wordy in his speechifying. I really dig the narrator as conspirator, especially when it's you and the narrator against the story itself. It's so post-modern it hurts me a little.

Tolkien's sentences are ponderous and wieldy, ambling over the countryside like Oliphaunts covered in little Southron men scrambling to make sense of their journey through the grammatical highlands of Gondor. This is a man who loves language, and is not afraid to use big words and lengthy thoughts in a children's book. This is the sort of book that was intended to be read aloud by a parent to their child. Children hear big words and rather than asking what each one of them means, just absorb it in context and in this way fill their reservoirs of language with exposure so the next time the word appears they'll have a better grasp of it.

I'm not looking forward to The Lord Of The Rings, though. There's so much travel in that book that to read it on alternate nights would be like watching the Fellowship teleport from place to place and end up alternately bored or fighting. Kind of like an episode of Sliders, only with elevensies.