**AUDIOBOOK** 
 J.R.R. Tolkien is a legend with his Lord of the Rings series. I remember growing up and my father collecting the DVDS (or maybe it was VHS at that time) as they came out. There was always such vivid world building, imagination, and creativity put into each and every movie. I didn't expect anything less from the book that started the series. The Hobbit is the beginning of what Tolkien created with the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures. 
 I found this story had a really slow build up at first for myself personally. It was really hard to understand get into the character and world that Tolkien was setting me up for. I will say though that the narrator in the audiobook was PHENOMENAL with his character voices. I got REALLY annoyed though by all the singing and songs. I got the reasoning but man did I just want to skip over those entire scenes. I also got really lost in the end and found myself drifting off very often. One second we're entering Smaugs lair finally and the next we're in a huge battle that I didn't really understand. It was confusing and jumped around a lot at the end. 
 I had higher expectations I guess.