Currently Reading Fellowship of The Rings, should I go back and read The Hobbit

[Clare]

I'm new to Tolkien, but now that I've discovered that I love listening to Audiobooks on my commute I'm diving into LOTR. I'm about 2/3 through Fellowship of the Ring but see a lot of suggestions here to read The Hobbit before the LOTR books.

Should I stop where I am, read Hobbit, and then finish Fellowship? Should I finish Fellowship, read Hobbit, and then pick up with the next LOTR book? Or should I finish all the LOTR books and then go back and read Hobbit?

Looking for suggestions from people who have read and loved them :) Thanks!

[John]

You can't go wrong with any of those approaches!
But since you are already immersed in Fellowship, I would recommend finishing Lord of the Rings and then going back to Hobbit. LOTR doesn't "need" Hobbit in order to be understood and loved.

[Neil]

I also agree--keep going with LOTR, and then go back to The Hobbit. LOTR and The Hobbit are connected because they're about the same world, but they're very different kinds of story (and then The Silmarillion is yet another kind of story)--and I like that. It makes the world seem more real to me, that each book gives a different sort of glimpse into it.

Incidentally, I think this is where Peter Jackson went most wrong with The Hobbit movies (I've only seen the first one). The Hobbit is an episodic children's story and should not have been forced to fit the look and feel of the LOTR films. A film version of it ought to retain the storybook-illustration feel, like what Anne Marie enjoys in Catlin's illustrations. The 2005 Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe film does a pretty good job of creating that kind of storybook visual approach (in fact, in some ways I like that film better than the LOTR films; it's not so full of itself and *ahem* serious and important).

(Yes, Tolkien himself began a re-write of The Hobbit to be more in the style of LOTR, and maybe it would've been great; but it wasn't necessary.)