The Ultimate Silmarillion (and other summer reading)

One thing that I've been enjoying about summer vacation is reading whatever I want to read instead of textbooks assigned by professors. One of the books I decided to re-read was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. In case you're not acquainted with it, it is basically the whole history of Middle Earth leading up to The Lord of the Rings. It gives tons of background information that helps make better sense of some of the characters and events in LOTR and is really a beautiful (though often tragic) story all by itself.

Most people don't read it unless they're really serious Tolkien fans (aka geeks) because it can be a bit dry (some of it reads more like a history book than a novel), and very confusing (because it covers thousands of years of "history"). One reason that this is "only" the second time I've read it (don't ask how many times I've read LOTR) is that there are so many characters that it can be very hard to keep them straight, and reading is considerably less enjoyable when you have to keep flipping back to the glossary and genealogical charts. The story primarily follows the history of the elves, and the men who were their allies. The elves are divided into a number of sub-groups, some of which are divided into two or three families, and the humans are divided into three major families/tribes. To get the full effect of the story you really have to keep straight what sub-group, family, etc. each character belongs to. Add to this Tolkien's tendency to make his names all sound very similar (Feanor, Finarfin, Fingolfin, Fingon, Finrod, etc.), and it can be very hard to keep everyone straight.

To make future readings more enjoyable I turned my copy into The Ultimate Silmarillion (or maybe it should be called The Reader's Silmarillion). As I read through the book I color-coded all the names of elves and men using highlighters and colored pens. It doesn't necessarily help with remembering individual characters (the most important ones are fairly easily remembered anyway since they come up a lot), but you can at least see at a glance which race, sub-group, family, etc. they belong to. Yeah, I know . . . I'm a total geek, but there's not much else to do at work on slow days between customers now that we can't go on the internet. Think I can get Doubleday (or whatever publishing house owns the rights to The Silmarillion) to buy the idea from me?

Besides The Silmarillion I've read a number of other books so far this summer. Looking at the list I think I might have strange taste in books. So far I've read:

Several Discworld books by Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites, Sourcery, and Mort). They're like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but fantasy instead of sci-fi. Very funny stuff with such great characters as Rincewind the wizard who can't do magic, homicidal luggage made of sapient pearwood, and Death (who TALKS IN ALL CAPITALS and is the only character to appear in every book I think) and they all live on a flat world that is carried through space on the backs of four elephants who are in turn on the back of a giant turtle.

About half of The Silent Blade (set in the Forgotten Realms world) by R. A. Salvatore - Lousy fantasy that just felt like you were reading a log of someone's D&D game. The characters were amazingly flat . . . the only one I found the least bit interesting was one of the villains. If R. A. Salvator is the best writer in the Forgotten Realms series (which is what I've heard), I hate to see the other books!

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - a highly disturbing, though scarily believable sci-fi book set in the near future where bands of teens go around committing acts of violent crime just for the fun of it. I think the book has been banned at one time or another in a number of countries due to the excessively violent/disturbing content.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - I really wasn't that impressed. I found it more obnoxious than charming. Maybe I was expecting too much out of a children's classic and would have liked it better if I was a kid. I've heard that Through the Looking Glass is better so maybe I'll try that one next.

The Trial by Franz Kafka - Possibly one of the strangest books I've ever read (and I've read some pretty weird sci-fi). It's a very surreal story about a man who is on trial and must defend himself in some bizarre courtrooms which meet in attics even though no one will tell him what the charge is. I had a hard time trying to figure out what (if anything) Kafka was satirizing. When I tried to look it up online I discovered that there are nearly as many opinions as there are people who have read it.

The Battle of Gettysburg: A Guided Tour by Edward J. Stackpole and Wilbur S. Nye- in preparation for our trip to Gettysburg next month. I love history, though I always find the Civil War to be an especially sad and terrible war (brother vs. brother and all that) . . . and no matter what the Southerners say I still maintain that it was largely about slavery (see this post from last year).

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis - just finished this one today. This was an excellent book! Though I disagreed with Lewis on some points (largely arising from that fact that he's strongly Arminian and I have a more Calvinistic understanding of free will and divine sovereignty), it was very thought provoking. He really makes you think about what it truly means to be a Christian.

I'm also currently reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It is kind of Charles Dickens or Jane Austin meets J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis. So far the book is excellent and if the last 500 pages are as good as the first 500 Susanna Clarke may just join J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as one of my favorite authors.

Hopefully I didn't bore you too much with all this talk about books. I think if I weren't married with a family to take care of I might be like Desiderius Erasmus who said, "When I have money I buy books . . . if any left over I buy food and clothes."