What are you reading in 2026?

[Autumnal]

We read that in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, Numenoreans mastered embalming and sought to restore life, or at least prolong it. Which means that there were Second Age Frankensteins. (And Doctor Wests? Essential salts?

)No wonder the Valar got pissed off.

My Tolkien binge continues. Finishing The Fall of Numenor tonight. Next, after some other stuff, may be The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, or the Fall of Gondolin, or The Nature of Middle-Earth, as my fancy takes me. After those will be the letters and the 12 volumes a friend calls F’ing Wot I Found Behind Da’s Desk, or the History of Middle-Earth.

 

[John Lloyd1]

We read that in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, Numenoreans mastered embalming and sought to restore life, or at least prolong it. Which means that there were Second Age Frankensteins. (And Doctor Wests? Essential salts?

)No wonder the Valar got pissed off.

My Tolkien binge continues. Finishing The Fall of Numenor tonight. Next, after some other stuff, may be The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, or the Fall of Gondolin, or The Nature of Middle-Earth, as my fancy takes me. After those will be the letters and the 12 volumes a friend calls F’ing Wot I Found Behind Da’s Desk, or the History of Middle-Earth.

How readable are those books? I have read the Similarion, but none of the other books published after Tolkien's death.

 

[Autumnal]

How readable are those books? I have read the Similarion, but none of the other books published after Tolkien's death.

The 12-volume History of Middle-Earth ranges from utterly fascinating to intensely dull, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. I suggest trying out any of the later ones concerned with Lord of the Rings from the library and see how you feel about them.

The Unfinished Tales volumes are similar but less intense, because there are much larger passages of continuous narrative only occasionally punctuated by footnotes about minor textual variations and such. They’re the place to go after the Silmarillion.

The Fall of Numenor is similar. It culls together narratives from a bunch of History of Middle-Earth volumes, including the unfinished time-travel novel The Lost Rod, and making a bunch of decisions about textual variations and versions in favor of enjoyable story as continuous as possible.

I haven’t read the others yet, so I can’t say for sure. I think that Nature of Middle-Earth is like Fall of Numenor but with a grab-bag of topics, and that Fall of Gondolin, Children of Hurin, and Beren and Luthien are more novel-like. I’ll have more to say when I get to theme.

Audiobooks: Riches. Andy Serkis does great with the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion. So did Rob Ingles, earlier. Others do fine with Unfinished Tales and Fall of Numenor. Christopher Lee reads Children of Hurin! Looking forward to that.

 

[trappedslider]

Isn't most of the book published after Tolkien's passing considered to have been what his son found in the rubbish bin? At least that's the joke i have seen in the fandom over the years

 

[Autumnal]

It’s the joke, including by me, but it’s not actually truth. There’s a lot of stuff JRR left behind that’s written, revised, edited, and ready to read. There are quite detailed outlines he wrote describing how a passage should go, usually worth pieces of dialogue along the way. There are short pieces of polished prose together with notes about their connections. And so on. And sometimes the jottings are themselves interesting for various reasons, like the very early First Age poetry written in the backs of duty rosters from 1917. They tell us things about his life and circumstances just like the letters.

So it’s really not just dumpster diving.

 

[Parmandur]

How readable are those books? I have read the Similarion, but none of the other books published after Tolkien's death.

Fascinating, but intense. Reading the Home books as a Teen is what made me realize I wanted to study English lit on the academic level. The overall structure is Byzantine, but a lot of the material is wild compared to the sanitized and flattened final product of The Similarion. The Book of Lost Tales is the set of first drafts of what became the Sil, and it is a very different beast that I would say is wroth checking out of the library. The first Lord of the Rings draft book, The Return of the Shadow, would be great to use the first chapter in a reader for any creative writing class, as it goes through every draft of An Unexpected Party.

 

[Reynard]

How readable are those books? I have read the Similarion, but none of the other books published after Tolkien's death.

The 12-volume History of Middle-Earth ranges from utterly fascinating to intensely dull, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. I suggest trying out any of the later ones concerned with Lord of the Rings from the library and see how you feel about them.

The Unfinished Tales volumes are similar but less intense, because there are much larger passages of continuous narrative only occasionally punctuated by footnotes about minor textual variations and such. They’re the place to go after the Silmarillion.

The Fall of Numenor is similar. It culls together narratives from a bunch of History of Middle-Earth volumes, including the unfinished time-travel novel The Lost Rod, and making a bunch of decisions about textual variations and versions in favor of enjoyable story as continuous as possible.

I haven’t read the others yet, so I can’t say for sure. I think that Nature of Middle-Earth is like Fall of Numenor but with a grab-bag of topics, and that Fall of Gondolin, Children of Hurin, and Beren and Luthien are more novel-like. I’ll have more to say when I get to theme.

Audiobooks: Riches. Andy Serkis does great with the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion. So did Rob Ingles, earlier. Others do fine with Unfinished Tales and Fall of Numenor. Christopher Lee reads Children of Hurin! Looking forward to that.

One thing I find worthwhile is to watch a YT video on a subject -- I really like In Deep Geek, but The Broken Sword is good too -- and then use that base knowledge as a way to dig into the Unfinished Tales, History of, various Encyclopedias, etc. As primarily reference books, those that I mentioned are better, IMO, to use to discover specific things than to read cover to cover.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The 12-volume History of Middle-Earth ranges from utterly fascinating to intensely dull, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. I suggest trying out any of the later ones concerned with Lord of the Rings from the library and see how you feel about them.

The Unfinished Tales volumes are similar but less intense, because there are much larger passages of continuous narrative only occasionally punctuated by footnotes about minor textual variations and such. They’re the place to go after the Silmarillion.

That about sums it up. Reading them can be fascinating, seeing different versions of what might have been, getting little insights into the world and characters that got tucked away. It can also feel like you're experiencing deja vu or the Mandela Effect as you read and re-read different takes on stories you're already deeply familiar with.

 

[briggart]

I've started the most recent DCC book and...I suspect I'm not going to like this one. I mostly don't care about the mechanics of the floors at all, and there's a lot of time spent on the races, so I find I'm skipping chunks pretty regularly. This has not been a great year for sequels in fantasy series for me, hopefully the new S. A. Chakraborty book can turn that around.

I just finished the DCC 8. While I didn’t find the floor mechanics as insufferable as you did, I agree the tone shift is particularly jarring after the epic storyline of the previous book. It does get better however, and in the second part it matches more the tone and feel of the previous book, although obviously much smaller in scale.

We also got a pretty big lore dump toward the end.

 

[jian]

Read The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow, the only one of this year's Hugo novel nominations I hadn't read, and it's a doozy. I think I may have to change my preference from Death of the Author to this one. Which is a slight pity, because The Everlasting is a much more traditional fantasy novel in a way, cleanly and beautifully written, but it's also very impressive.

Owen Mallory is a historian who desperately seeks to belong in Dominion, a country not unlike Britain just after WW1. He has devoted much of his life to the study of Sir Una Everlasting, a heroine who is central to the creation myth of Dominion. And so when he's sent back in time a couple of thousand years to meet Una and guide her to her death, he's overjoyed and conflicted. And it only gets more complicated from there.

Much of the story is about how history is a pile of accidents, and it doesn't tell a story until you make it do so. And who is free, who loves another?