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So, what are you reading?
I finished Nasr Abu Zayd's Rethinking the Qur'an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. It's a short essay, but very valuable.
Zayd's hope is to fight against that outcome in Middle East/Western relations, which 'hostility' he sees as being supported by the adapting of Islam to resistance.
I just finished the Silmarillion. I've had the book for decades, and had read most of the stories out-of-order at one point or another (with the rest being filled in by wikipedia dives and the occasional lore video on youtube), but this was the first time I actually committed to reading the whole thing front to back. This is also the first time I've read any of it since reading George RR Martin's Fire and Blood, the only other book I'm aware of in this particular genre of "not quite a fantasy novel, not quite a history book." It's a fascinating contrast, and a handy reminder that Tolkein is still the undisputed king.
The central conceipt of Fire and Blood is that it's an in-universe history book drawing from multiple unreliable sources, with the fun coming from noticing the various biases and trying to piece together "what really happened." Something I didn't realize until now, however, is that the Silmarillion is doing basically the same thing, but never tells you. You may notice as you read that some stories are told as detailed accounts inlcuding dialogue and a more-or-less full recounting of events, while other important events and even entire centuries get glossed over in a single paragraph. If you read particularly closely, you'll notice a pattern where the stories involving Gondolin and Doriath are told in longform with lots of details, and the more removed from these kingdoms you get, the more sparse the prose becomes. The sons of Fëanor and their realms, for example, recieve almost zero attention in the text. This is because the "author/editor" of the Silmarillion was clearly a refugee from Gondolin who moved to the mouths of Sirion where their people mingled with refugees from Doriath (this is confirmed by Tolkein in the Unfinished Tales, yough nowhere made explicit in the Silmarillion itself). We have no stories from Himring or Thargelion or Ossiriand because those people never had the opportunity to share them with Tolkien's source.
Now, we know that the real reason for this is that the Fall of Gondolin, the Children of Hurin, and the tale of Beren and Luthien are the three main First Age stories Tolkein wanted to tell (and the only ones he'd get even somewhat close to completing), and his son had to cobble together the Silmarillion from a bunch of unorganized and contradictory notes after Tolkein died. But this almost makes it better? Unlike Fire and Blood, with its manufactured inconsistencies and clear authorial intent, the Silmarillion really is a lost book of fragmented histories requiring careful historigraphical analysis to fully understand. Just like with his languages and other aspects of worldbuilding, Tolkein presents the real thing where other fantasy authors only present a facsimile. I get the same joy of discovery reading the Silmarillion as I get reading Le Morte d'Arthur.
The Silmarillion is my favorite book, bar none. I think there are a couple of reasons why. One is that when I was a teenager reading LOTR, I picked up on all the references Tolkien made to the wider history of the world (as he intended, of course). I was super curious to learn more about who Fëanor was, who was Elbereth, what was "the West that is forgotten", and so on. So when I finally did read the Silmarillion, it scratched an itch that I had for quite a while and was very satisfying.
The second reason I like it so much is because of the way it's written. Honestly, that's surprising to me, because normally I care nothing for prose and view the words as simply a vehicle to communicate the story to me. But something about the way Tolkien writes the Silmarillion (and also LOTR, though not as much) really moves me. I suspect it's because he was intentionally modeling his work on the real life epics he knew so well, but either way it gets my blood pumping. One of my favorite passages:
It's so majestic (the whole passage, not just the bit I quoted). It really does elevate the story beyond what it would otherwise be, and make it something special.
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