I've been stuck in a Hobbit reverie for days now. At supper Michelle and Pallas were apparently counting to ten in spanish and they asked me how they did and I was like, "Uh, sorry, I wasn't really paying attention. I was in Middle-earth." But uno dos tres they did it perfectly the second time around.

A Twitter discussion led me to go get my copy of Unfinished Tales, a book I've had nearly as long as The Hobbit. I got it from my Grandpa's store, which was (it's still around, actually, my Grandma still runs it) a health food/ insurance agency/ Christian bookstore. When I saw this book I was so excited, expecting another tome of high adventure, though little ten-year-old me was sorely disappointed as it was nearly impenetrable. It's kind of got the same vibe as The Silmarillion (which I finally did read while tramping around New Zealand) though it is more just scraps and stuff covering all three ages of Middle-earth.
One of the briefer sections is an account by Gandalf of how he came to be part of the Dwarven company and why he convinced Thorin to recruit Bilbo Baggins. I thought there might be a little back-story for Thorin regarding the name Oakenshield. If you haven't seen the movie yet I won't say anything more, but I just wanted to see if there was a Tolkien provenance for what was shown onscreen. Well, it wasn't here but there was a brief mention of the orc Azog so that was cool.
Yeah, all this info is freely available on the internet but sometimes it's fun to pull a book off your bookshelf and look it up yourself. I knew I saved that book for a reason!