Have you seen The Hobbit yet?

• How many of my readers will be going to see Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey this weekend?
• If you have seen it, what did you think? Did you go to the midnight premiere?
• How many of you are re-reading the book first?
• Share some of your favorite sentences from the book or lines from the movie in the comments section.

This is one of my favorite sentences:

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)—Gandalf came by.”

The core of the sentence—”Gandalf came by”—is so simple, but Tolkien builds readers’ anticipation with so much additional information, as well as beautiful phrases such as “the quiet of the world”, that we are on the edge of our seats by the time we first hear Gandalf’s name.

Talk about the craft of writing!