The Hobbit (Dramatized)

Where this reading excels at is the atmosphere. The music sets the feeling a lot of the time and makes it feel peaceful, scary, and mysterious. The voices aren't the best but they do give a good impression of what the characters would likely sound like, a few of them sound too much like each other though. Otherwise, this is an amazing reading!

I should have payed attention to the running time as this is VERY abbreviated! I thought the voices were kind of "cartoonish" and it seemed geared more for children. I'll stick with the unabridged novel.

Hard to determine what the actors were saying at times.

This is an entertaining version of the Hobbit. They have been able to prune the story down to a reasonable 4h 13 minutes (much shorter than the 3 movies or the 11 hour unabridged version). Plus you get an ensemble cast that breath life into the various characters. Lacking a lot of Tolkien's descriptive text, the story moves along. The actors do a great job portraying the various characters from Gandalf and Bilbo to Thorin and Golem. In addition, the use of sound effects and music turn a narrative story into a dramatic radio play. The one complaint I have is that the levels are too variable for spoken text. I mainly listed in our car, and frequently had to turn up the volume to hear what people were saying and then had to crank it back down when fighting or actions threatened my ear drums.This is a great, and relatively fast, way to introduce someone to the initial book in Tolkien's Middle Earth saga.

I personally like this audio version of the book. It is much better that the BBC audio, which has a lot of distracting background music. These audio versions have been perfect for my 10 year old, who loves the story, is very intelligent, but has some reading difficulties. But... I am glad I did not just jump in and purchase this. I was an Audible customer for years, and they provide a wonderful service for those who can afford to buy the audio downloads. If I were getting an audio version to listen to myself, I would be going to my local library that has a copy with Rob Inglis reading the book. He is simply the best. As I pointed out earlier though, this is for my 10 year old who does seem to follow along better with a cast of charterers reading the parts. So I was able to get for free, the download threw my local library on Neibors. Now he has the chance to listen to the story, I didn't have to pay for a thing, and my library is justified in providing this service to its patrons. Win, Win!!!

It wasn’t what I expected.

Much better than the book just being read to you. Multipal people are the voices of the different characters. Makes the book much more life like. It is also great to hear the story as written by Tolkin instead of changed like was done to the movies.

We have this in CD's, but my new car doesn't have a CD player so we downloaded this! This is the best version available - music, different actors, great vocabulary! My sons have been listening to this since my youngest was 4 and is now 21! He used to quote it in kindergarten! The fact that they still enjoy it is testament that it is a great book and version!