I had read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in high school, but I had never attempted to read The Silmarillion, or as a former coworker of mine calls it, The Silma-millionwords. So I tried.
And in the spirit of generally trying to be kind to myself, my reduced anxiety around failure, lessons learned from The Great Book Slump, and generally not devoting my time to things I'm not interested in I... asked if anyone knew where I could find an audiobook. I'm not utterly devoid of determination.
The same former coworker furnished this link to an unabridged version of The Silmarillion in audio form.
I had a much better time with it.
For as wordy as The Silmarillion is, it's a really beautiful story. And since I'm an aural learner, I could actually retain what I was hearing.
The Silmarillion is the story of how J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth came to be. A bunch of gods sang, some super-trees sprouted, and some guy took the light from the trees and made it into three jewels called the Silmarils. Morgoth, the baddest of the bad guys, coveted the jewels and eventually stole them with the help of his spider-lady-friend, Ungoliant (my favorite character -- she vomits poison and makes everything generally awful.) Ages passed, and there were wars and quests. There are some humorous moments, but many of the tales are tragic. All of the events of The Silmarillion lead up to the events of the Lord of the Rings. I won't spoil it because I believe this book to be worth your time, whether you read it or listen to it.
The stories in The Silmarillion contain themes and lessons that are good to hear in these troubled times. The characters who are jealous, greedy and covetous usually meet terrible ends, but not before making things terrible for other people. If there's an opportunity for a character to take the easy road, it almost always leads to their doom. Suffering makes you stronger. If you suffer with a bunch of other people, it'll bring you closer together. If you work hard at something, you'll eventually master it. Et cetera.
It's not an easy read by any means, and listening to it made it far more interesting to me. The prose is pretentious and wordy. A lot of the characters have similar names. It's difficult to keep track of which places are what and who's going where.
I listened to The Silmarillion on and off all summer, and I eventually finished it last month. I waffled for a long time about whether or not I wanted an Audible account because I really enjoy the experience of absorbing a book into my brain while I'm doing something else, usually cross stitching or knitting. I know audiobooks aren't a new thing. I had a copy of "Fight Club" on a bunch of CDs that I got from Borders back in the olden days when Borders was a store and I had a long commute to work. I don't really gravitate toward absorbing my books through my ears because I can read much faster with my eyeballs.
I pulled the trigger last week and I've already listened to Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale, which was a retelling of the Russian fairy tale, "Morozko," and the first in a trilogy. I have the third book, The Winter of the Witch, as an ARC to review for City Book Review.
As a somewhat funny aside, the same Russian fairy tale is lambasted in its movie form, "Jack Frost," on an episode of MST3K.
What have I learned? Some books aren't so terribly intolerable when you can listen to them. Audiobooks are good for long commutes and for pursuing multiple hobbies at once. And from The Silmarillion: Even if things in the world change, and they're not as ideal as they once were, you can always take comfort in the people around you who share your values? I'll keep thinking about that one.
If I get around to blogging next week, I'll chat about my adventure with the "Throne of Glass" series. Because that's been interesting.
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