The Hobbit

[thesummerqueen]

I have reread The Hobbit and LotR several times but never read The Silmarillion. This thread has made me want to finally read that book.

It is easier to read with a lecture series like I mentioned, or a study guide. I think the thing that trips a lot of people up is the sheer amount of names in Elvish that Tolkien spits out. Dude basically back-engineered stories for everything after making up names. It is also easier the first time if you try to ignore the names and just read it once through to get the basic frame work of the creation story, then the subsequent movements of the Elves. And there are also charts on the net to help you parse out what all the names refer to later.

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History & genealogies without much action or dramatic arc. I found it too dry to finish.

Hardly. It contains a lot more than genealogies, and if you were looking for action and missed it, you were skipping over things that didn't slap you in the face.