... and in other book news, today, I realized I am a glutton for punishment on some things.
A year ago, I managed to read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion in its entirety. Now, as anyone who has attempted to do this knows, this is no easy task. The prose is dry, the characters and such almost entirely unfamiliar (with the basic exception of Sauron, and even then he's only a minor character in the histories that are involved).
It's basically a royal pain in the ass.
Like most geeks, I've got a "book queue" of sorts, the books I've purchased that I want to read. Well, three years ago while I was still at Yahoo, I bought a bunch of books, and three days ago, I set upon a quest.
I am reading, start to finish, the twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth books. Now, if you think The Silmarillion is dry, you haven't seen The Book of Lost Tales! Good chunks of it are prose as dry as the former, but then filled with pages of analysis of the work itself, how Tolkien evolved the history from revision to revision.
Dry, but interesting, reading. I'll probably know way more about Middle-Earth than I ever needed to know, by the time I'm done.
Go Derek, Go!