The Great Shadow vs The Silmarillion: Which Should You Read?

The Great Shadow Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892 ★★★★☆ 3.8 134 pages · ≈ 2 h 29 m · Challenging

“It is strange to me, Jock Calder of West Inch, to feel that though now, in the very centre of the nineteenth century, I am but five-and-fifty years of age, and though it is only once in a week perhaps that my wife can pluck out a little grey bristle from over my ear, yet I have lived in a time when the thoughts and the ways of men were as different as though it were another planet from this.”

| caption = Title page for The Great Shadow (1892)

The Silmarillion J. R. R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien · 1977 ★★★★☆ 4.0 374 pages · ≈ 6 h 56 m · Moderate

A number-one New York Times bestseller when it was originally published, The Silmarillion is the core of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginative writing, a work whose origins stretch back to a time long before The Hobbit.