Every time I get ready to re-read Tolkien, I get a little nervous. What if it's just not as good as I remember it? But my fears are always needless. Tolkien truly had a gift for writing stories that were not just exciting or interesting, but beautiful as well. The Hobbit is sometimes treated as an inferior to Lord of the Rings because the latter is an epic and the former is more of a fairy tale. I won't argue that Lord of the Rings was Tolkien's best work, but The Hobbit is special because it is a fairy tale. When I was little, I didn't care much for Tolkien. He used to many big words and he had a boring, grown-up tone to his writing. But now I can read The Hobbit and feel the same wonder at his Middle Earth as I did when I first discovered fairy tales. When I got older I needed a bigger fairy tale, and that's exactly what the Hobbit is. Every time I read it, I fall in love all over again.