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I can barely get through The Hobbit in my 40's and not because I can't read, I just read better books. It's pretty bad. When I was a kid I was so bored by TH I just never got past the first chapter. It's literally aimed at adults I believe was the point. Kids can read it sure but the themes dont hit

I was ten years old when I read it. Myself. And I learned how to write in runes.

So… even if everything this person said were true, in what way is it “not for kids”? Is complex sentence structure somehow objectionable now? Trust me, if the kid isn’t into it, they’ll tell you. What is that person’s life like?

Lots of people with deep obsessions with "being an adult and liking adult things" and if you even hint that they like something that has a minimum demo of below 10 y/o they have a melt down. Looking at Pixar and AtLA

I read it when I was 10. Understood it just fine. Read T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" at 11. Also fine.

I read The Hobbit then LOTR to both my kids (tweens at the time), and got through the full "Series of Unfortunate Events" with #1 kiddo. Never quite made it through the "Eragon" series with #2 before we both kind of lost interest. They're solid readers to this day.

At least this makes more sense than last month’s discourse about adult books having too many big words?

I mean if platforms that make us carve down our character/word count constantly, have actually made us unconsciously assume that ADULTS cannot handle long sentences and therefore that kids can't handle long sentences and so we shouldn't try societal collapse is not an unreasonable expectation

The Hobbit was literally my favorite book as a child lol. I went around stumping adults with riddles from Riddles in the Dark for a solid decade.

Maybe it depends on which country it’s being read in. For most countries it’s a book for children.

I totally read the hobbit at like, age 10, and simply thought the forest travails went on for entirely too long, but from a child’s literary criticism standpoint, not that I couldn’t comprehend it lol

Too many adults forget what it's like to be a kid. The enviable elasticity of their brains need to be stretched, not left alone or shrunken.

No, it’s the children who are wrong

Hilarious, I read the Hobbit as an 8 year old. My mum was reading it to me and I decided she was going too slow so I took over.

Classic tech bro though.

Oh my, I probably wouldn't go out to show my whole ass saying stuff like "This book for children uses to complicated sentences for me to parse" as that guy...

This kills me as someone who probably owes his literacy and love for a good story to my parents reading The Hobbit to me before I started kindergarten.

Didn't Tolkien write the Hobbit because he used to tell it as a bedtime story to his kids until they started pointing out whenever he got small details mixed up?

its so funny to be like "only me a genius can read it its actually like DANGEROUS if you arent qualified, basically"

Kids love winding elaborate language even if they don't know every word because they often don't know everything they hear (because hi they're children) They still see not understanding something as an opportunity to learn and not shame disguised as dismissal.

Oh no, won't someone save the children from *checks notes* elaborate vernacular! 🤣

Im so glad im not on twitter anymore. Id be losing my mind right now.

I love the language complaint, who’da thunk a 90-year-old novel written by a professional academic might seem a little stiff and archaic out here in the age of skibidee TikTok?

Good thing there's a BBC read through at their local library they can follow along and sound out the harder stuff

The real worry is that if kids start reading The Hobbit, they might keep reading Tolkien and then figure out the companies naming themselves out of the legendarium are the bad guys.

Imagine struggling with a children's book. Sign of the times I guess.

Adding on: the idea that the sentence structure and length are too hard for kids ignores the fact that there is no “normal” language for kids. They will learn whatever you give to them—that’s how kids work! Bro is upset because he has trouble with the style, and thinks he’s more capable than a kid.

Wait, the vernacular is dated?! Well this comes as a complete shock, let me tell you, shock! Frankly it's disgusting that a book published in 1937 doesn't use modern terminology. How dare Tolkien not use hashtag and skibidi in his works.

No offense but who is just getting into The Hobbit as an adult

"reading is haaaard :(" bro is really telling on himself here

In defense of ‘society may really be collapsing’

I read The Hobbit around fifth grade. Found it on a shelf in the library I think - loved it.

Read really dense prose as a child. We had books that came with the Collier's Encyclopedia. I read fairy tales, Greek mythology, and classics in books with few illustrations and those were black & white engravings. Just reread Treasure Island last year and the language is gorgeous!

I like how they're so conspiracy-brained that they're even using "someone is LYING to you!" about The Hobbit being primarily for children

I have recently read The Hobbit and the way it was so clearly written to be read to children was so lovable and charming.

I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 9 and loved it (best time to read it, I'd say because you have the stamina and inexperience to just keep plugging your way through it).

My Grade 3 teacher read us The Hobbit and we all sat there spellbound for months.

I read the hobbit in Second Grade. I read lord of the rings before the movie came out at like 9. I didn’t understand everything but you get the gist.

This is so silly. I read The Hobbit as a child, maybe 5 years old? Before school started. A big illustrated version. At some point I convinced myself that it was actually abridged, a ‘child’s version’ but I checked at one point and no, it was the full original text. It’s just a child’s book!

...as someone who had it read TO me starting in kindergarten, and started reading it in second grade and all of it in third, and then all of Lord of the Rings in fourth, and this directly leading to a love of reading, this strikes me as ludicrous and weird. HOWEVER. This is from ppl remaining on X😵‍💫

I guess I don't understand what this guy wants? novel length Dick & Jane & Spot?

Also funny comments expressing disbelief that children could read 300 page books (as if Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and so on hadn't come out in recent history...)

So kids are dumb is a take. I read the Hobbit at nine solo. I may not be the best barometer, but stop doing this to children about books.

I read LOTR in its entirety in third grade and then moved onto Dickens. Nonreaders have such weird takes on what is possible.

The hobbit was foundational to my learning to love reading when I was a young child. I can't even imagine what kind of person could bounce off of its prose, it was effortlessly pleasurable to me.

Ah yes, the deep allegory of Tim Bombadil can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water: Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!

I read Shakespeare in 7th-8th grade. Kids are more able than adults give them credit for, let them challenge themselves if they want it.

"Vernacular dated"? I have some news about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

The "vernacular" is "dated and elaborate": The book was written almost a century ago. Using the words "vernacular" and "elaborate" just makes you sound like you're trying to sound more well-read than you are (like Peter Griffin when he heard "shallow and pedantic") and diminishes your argument

My dad used to read it to my sibling and I. It was our favorite thing to have him read.

Ah, yes. Those people world famous for not being able to pick up new languages totally alien to them: children

“Vernacular dated and elaborate.” Hell yeah. Bring it, you philistine.

So, roughly 90% of the people I know who did read The Hobbit, read it between the ages of 10-13. And loved it.

Enjoyed hobbit in 2nd or 3rd grade. Could never make it all the way through LoTR though - I was bored by all the battle scenes (sorry!) People really underestimate kids.

This sounds like hobbit obsessed adults retrofitting the books’ difficulty to justify their place in their lives

'The Hobbit' has elaborate sentence structure?!? ROFL

The post in the screenshot is so depressing.

Even beyond overrating the difficulty, I’m also annoyed by the apparent idea that reading a challenging book with your kids is bad.

Oh ffs, didn't Tolkien write for his own kids?

Children are poorly educated now and are capable of much more than is asked of them.

When children are being read a story aloud their comprehension levels of the story are higher. Listening uses a different part of the brain than reading. It comes from an evolutionary perspective- oral story telling has been around a lot longer than reading written language.

Are they maybe confusing The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings?? I say this knowing that when I read StoryGraph reviews after I finish a book I often say to myself in response to some reviewers, "Oh was the book difficult, or, maybe, you're dumb?" But I try to give these people some grace sometimes.

The Hobbit literally started as bedtime stories Tolkien told his kids, lmao.

He's going to hate this but when I read The Hobbit to my kids I read it with Bilbo as a woman. And I thought that was great. It wasn't my idea. I was inspired by some article I read online but Bilbo makes an excellent heroine.

I don’t want to know that this guy thinks the hobbit is too hard. I want to know ow what this guy lets his kids read. I think that will say the quiet part out loud.

I like how he's telling on himself. This book from almost 90 years ago is too difficult for a grown-up to read.

It's not for the average Trumper is what I'm hearing.

I was assigned “The Hobbit” in Middle School when I was 11 or 12. I liked it enough to go to the library and read “Lord.” I also read “The Once and Future King,” which is a far more difficult book in my opinion.

For all his talk of sentence structure, I think most people arguing against it being a children's book have not read it at all, and just imagine it must be too long and perhaps too scary as it has been turned into a movie trilogy. As for long and complicated sentence structure, anyone who has >>

Hmmm. I read LOTR when I was ~8 or so, and it was a hard slog. The Hobbit was much easier. Kid stuff.

This all makes sense to me in a way. All these tech dufuses who read these books and are obsessed with Tolkien despite obviously not grasping a single syllable of those works.

Like kids aren’t allowed to be exposed to anything challenging beyond Disney movies growing up. She even makes parallels between the movies and book and I think that’s really cool for a 4 year old. (2/2)

It's ABSOLUTELY the intersection of the "Use LLMs for everything" and "think about the CHILDREN" lines turned up to 11. Outsource all your thinking to the machines, never consume anything not 100% sanitized by your masters, be content with the scraps we let you have, you are too dumb to rebel.

Don't give Elon too much credit. Yes, his agenda is to ruin society as we know it and everything he does and says is garbage; but a lot of this is just good old fashioned home-grown stupid.

Long lists of characters who barely have any dialog, song after song, super talkative monsters/enemies, the main POV character‘s arc being a coming of age story; I can see these being tedious for an adult reading it for the first time (I adored it all as a child and still do as an adult)

Absolutely - you were modelling what fluent readers do and your children were absorbing all kinds of tricks and techniques that fluent readers do. Another way to work on reading skills with your kids is to take turns reading portions of a text out loud. Reading to children is soooo important.

My mom also read me The Hobbit and it made me a lifelong fantasy fan.

I read the short story collection that included The Canterville Ghost at around seven or eight. And I discovered Saki's short stories not long after - if it was on the shelves, I read it.

welp, time to run into the woods and howl for a while

in fairness, the sort of tech bros who own and name tech companies are very stupid

I read Beowulf (Seamus Heaney's translation) to my then three year old. We both had a great time with it.

You can read it aloud in less time than it would take to watch the movies.

We read it to our kid a little earlier than that, but she LOVED adventure stories of any kind.

I remember being angry when a teacher told me to narrow my language like that in school. With due apologies to my editors, as an adult it is something up with which I will not put.

Haven’t been in years, except when someone links a tweet. Don’t have the app. Don’t want it. I recommended this program for improved mental health. JS.

We really need to study the way some sections of humanity have decided to infantilize and dumb down kids - even those late in their teens - like they're somehow incapable to doing or understanding anything more complicated than tying shoelaces. It's mind boggling!