Seventh, I think. Spreadsheet only goes back to 2003.

I read this aloud to both children and then again on my own last winter, so the count has gone fuzzy. Seven is a guess. My list starts in 2003 and there were at least three before that.

The thing I had wrong for years: I'd have sworn the trolls came after Rivendell. They don't. They're before, and it matters, because the whole shape of that sequence is Gandalf getting them out of it, and later on he can't and won't.

Reading it out loud teaches you things that reading it silently does not. The songs are far better spoken. The dwarf-naming is a slog on the page and a joy in a room. And Bilbo is a great deal more sarcastic than I had been giving him credit for.

What changed in me: I always found the last quarter, after Smaug, a disappointment. The dragon dies offstage to a man we have barely met and then everybody argues about money for ages. Now I think that's the best decision in it. It's the only children's adventure I know where the treasure turns out to be the problem.

Ten. Not a critical judgement. My father read it to me and I read it to mine, and there is no version of me that scores this one honestly.