The Silmarillion

The book Tolkien worked on for sixty years and never finished. His son Christopher assembled it from the drafts after his death, and it reached print in 1977, four years after the author's, carrying the whole mythology that The Lord of the Rings only glances at over its shoulder.

It opens with a piece of music. The world is sung into being, one voice sings against the theme, and every catastrophe in the next five hundred pages descends from that one dissonance. Then: the making of three jewels, an oath sworn over them that cannot be taken back, and the slow ruin of everyone bound by it. Beren and Lúthien. Túrin. The drowning of Númenor.

It reads like scripture or the Norse sagas rather than like a novel — chronicle voice, enormous span, hundreds of names, very little dialogue. That is the barrier and it is also the point. Readers who bounce off it usually bounced off the register, not the story; readers who get through it tend to say it recoloured everything else Tolkien wrote.