The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey

The Book

As the film version of the Hobbit has been stretched to the limit of three movies, I will stick to the book's first half (I have only read up to where the film ends). This makes it slightly difficult, but a very good friend of mine has told me what I need to know..
The story was written by Tolkien for his children and I have read it out aloud to my ten year old daughter and have also used passages in recent workshops I organised at the library. It is so well written for this purpose, with asides to the reader and great fun passages to use different voices (The children and I especially enjoyed the adventure with the trolls and guessing the riddles posed by Gollum and Bilbo).
Other stand out passages for me were the fight between the rock giants and the Goblins sneaking the ponies out of the cave. Having seen the film now, I want to re-read this all over again to see where Peter Jackson has taken brief mentions in the text and expanded them to complete scenes.

Cosmopolis

The Book

I found Cosmopolis quite a difficult read. The story focuses on a wealthy young billionaire travelling in his high-tech limousine through a city in turmoil to have his hair cut at his old family barber. Other billionaires are murdered as the world's financial markets are in meltdown. Eric has played his part in this, through mismanaging the yen, and there are potential threats against his life.
The whole story is a bit of a dream world with bizarre incidences featuring rats, fleeting appearances by a range of individual advisors turning up in his car, and encounters on several occasions with women who may or may not be his wife. His actions seem irrational and those of someone who is bored of life and actually wants to experience death as the one thing he cannot afford or control.
Ultimately I didn't really feel any connection with the character and so didn't really care whether he lived or died.