reelo
Hero
Honestly, Ive read the Similarian, I cant recommend it. It is not that good. Tolkien didnt even want to release it for years. It actually has very little to do with Lord of the rings, its mostly a very long a drawn out history of the origin of the phile of light Frodo got from Gladriel, and the white tree of Gondor. Gondor itself is barely touched apon but if you want to know the family lineage of the TREE the book has you covered. Most of the things you would be curious about are covered in the appendixes not in the similarian. I think the Similarian has some good content but its pretty impenetrable and allot of it is not really worth reading. You can definitely tell that Tolkien wrote the LOTR so that any one could enjoy it and he wrote the Similarian for himself.
I absolutely love the Silmarillion.I've read it too, and I'm glad I did. I can cut it a lot of slack because it wasn't left in a format intended for publication when Tolkien died. But it's absolutely not a novel, and anyone who goes to it expecting an experience similar to The Hobbit or LOTR is likely to be in for a shock. It's more like an in-universe history book.
The best way I found to get through it was to treat it as a book of short stories: read a chapter or two, then read something else, then come back and read another chapter or two. And the genealogical charts in the back were an absolute necessity.
While I agree that parts of it are...difficult, the 3 central stories, "Beren and Lúthien", "the Children of Húrin", and "the Fall of Gondolin" are absolutely worth it, and Tolkien absolutely intended to release those 3 at some point. He just never came around to it.
For anyone finding the Silmarillion too dry to read, I recommend the standalone book of "The Children of Húrin" which is a lot better than the Silmarillion version.