Imagine yourself reading
The Hobbit to your six or seven year old son or daughter. In fact, I read it to my daughter about twenty years ago when she was about six. She was so annoyed when I stopped into a pop-up bookstore and poked around until I found this
Annotated Hobbit about a year earlier
Then I read it to her, and then she read it herself... and we were off and running with LOTR.
Now that the movie is coming out, and I've seen the trailer, I think I must reread it - maybe out loud, to get the pacing right. I'm not sure the story I read was in the trailer I saw...