Never could crack into the Silmarillion. It sits a few feet away collecting dust on my bookshelf, as it has for nearly twenty years. Perhaps it’s time to try again.
And I agree. For the most part, the casting in the movies was superb.
I’ve been reading it to three of my sons, who are currently 13, 11, and 9. (Sometimes other people hang around, too.) We started out reading and studying “The Hobbit” with a group from the homeschool association in the year before the first movie came out. Then I figured we might as well read LOTR, and it took several years to get through it all.
Then I figured I hadn’t read the Silmarillion since I was in high school, so we started that. Parts of it go very slowly, but other parts have lots of action. And it’s full of vocabulary that might be useful on the SAT!