HuwG - Yup, missed that one, but I'm not doing bad for 'from memory'!

Clinton - I'm at a loose end, have a fight! *BG*

The Silmarillion isn't crap & wets on anything GG Kay (notable for an awful integration of Arthurian myth into a pulp story, IMO) will ever achieve. I'll partly agree - once you get past UT, it is rather a cash cow, but 'rape & pillage' is unfair. CJJ hasn't produced this market out of nothing. I suspect, as the inheritor of his father's writings, he's spent a lot of time writing letters in response to requests for more information (as his father did before him) & therefore came to the conclusion that it would make more sense to methodically work through the inherited notes for the benefit of those that were interested. No-one forced you to read the stuff.

The Silmarillion only reads badly if you expect it to be a story like TH or LOTR. It was never intended to be that. UT is useful as a source of further, more fragmented, background information. After that, granted, it starts getting a bit silly.

Whatever else you may care to say about him, Tolkien never set out to write multiple books, a charge that most modern Fantasy authors cannot deny, since they do it quite deliberately (GGK - guilty!). Nor did he spend all that time on the background info with a view to nothing else but getting it published. The fact that it has been is testament not only to the quality of the original work, but to the depth of the supporting mythology he produced. No modern author has ever matched the achievement, no matter how many pulp novels set in a single world they've managed to churn out.

Alright, not much of a fight really, but hey, you're the man that thinks the film was better than the book, so what can I say?! :p ;)