And so we find ourselves at the rear-end of the year, being forced to consume the half-digested summaries of news, culture, sport and trivia from 2013, where editors hope the next 72 hours don't bring anything horrific like the Boxing Day tsunami to mess up our feel-good somnambulance into 2014. The Guardian is as guilty of this as any of the lesser newspapers, with the Weekend magazine featuring "Lists of the Year" including a list of lists, and features on viral videos, beards and cheese. The Review section holds a special kind of hell, and an opportunity for me to feel smug(ger than usual) in the form of the Best-selling Books Of The Year . This year I have read precisely one of them, which is one more than usual, and yet I am not disheartened as the one book is Tolkien's The Hobbit , which I first read 35 years ago at the tender age of 8, little imagining that it would be made into a 40-hour epic series of films by a man who looks almost but not entirely li...