How old is the reader? If they are under 12 then I would say its best.It gives them a shorter, simpler story to whet their appetite with so they will have the oomph to tackle the more complex stories in Lord of the Rings.It also gives them a stake in the LOtR story from moment 1. They know who Bilbo, Gloin, and Gandalf are.And They understand about hobbits and dwarves.The big difference is the simplicity of the story and the fun lighthearted storytelling style.As an adult I think it depends on your reading style.I do think its a good idea to read the hobbit at some point… but it may actually hinder your initial enjoyment of the story if you feel its talking down to you. Any adult reading Tolkien for the first time without knowing why he wrote the Hobbit would assume that's what he was doing. Talking down.If you wanna know if its a gpod idea watch the first hobbit movie. Its the only one done in a style consistent with the Hobbit book. And its also the one most non tolkien people thought was most annoying… because of the singing.
You may understand it, but I don’t know that you’d appreciate it fully. The Silmarillion is about people who lived and events that happened in the First Age of the World (some 7000 years before the action of LotR). The book actually has five parts: Ainulindale, the creation story; Valaquenta, a description of the Valar; the Silmarillion proper; Akallabeth—the downfall of Numenor; and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. Much of the material in The Silmarillion connects with events, people, and themes in LotR, but many of the links were left out of the movies. So I think you’ll get more out of The Silmarillion if you have read LotR first. For example, the movies don’t completely explain Aragorn’s heritage, his connection with the heroes of the First Age, and his relationship to Elrond.The other thing is that The Silmarillion can be a bit dense. It’s not written in a novelistic form, but as mythologized history. I generally recommend that people read LotR first, and try reading the Appendices at the end of LotR. A reader who can get into the Appendices has a good chance of enjoying the Sil. A reader who finds the Appendices boring or impenetrable will not like The Silmarillion.The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are good reads. IMO you are depriving yourself if you don’t read them. As much as I liked the movies (LotR, anyway), they’re no substitute for the books.
You could obviously cut out a ton of stuff and make them more faithful. I suspect that’s been done by fans. I’m not interested, because Tolkien himself started to rewrite The Hobbit from start to finish to make it consistent with The Lord of the Rings. Revising the story to do just that was apparently one of Peter Jackson’s goals, and a good one.In terms of fixing the films, the proper goal would be to make them coherent and internally consistent. Or, to use the vernacular, the goal would be to have them make f****** sense.There are so many things in the movie that don’t make sense that it would be almost terrifying if it weren’t so frequently hilarious. Huge plot points are raised and dropped, most importantly, the idea that recovering the Arkenstone is all that they want to accomplish initially (which means they could have left Erebor without trying to kill Smaug), and that Sauron might use Smaug to attack the good guys. Thorin thinks Azog is dead, so he seems to believe that losing a limb is a fatal wound. Meanwhile, Azog sends out messages offering a price for Thorin’s head without signing his name! How is someone supposed to collect the bounty?I could go on and on. The passage over the Misty Mountains is so difficult that it almost kills Thorin and Company twice, but Radagast navigates it in his bunny sled without difficulty—and then finds Gandalf with just as little effort.These are not nit-picking when you’re adapting an author who took pains to describe the correct phase of the moon whenever it was mentioned.