I know I've said this sort of thing about some book or other before -- but here goes again. I have 4500 books, and if I had to winnow my library down to 200, this book (in this case The Silmarillion) would make the cut. This isn't entirely just a way of talking. Perhaps one day I (and others here) will have to make that kind of reduction in our libraries before moving into quarters suited to those of advanced age. Nobody wants to do that but some of us will.
Id read it years ago in soft cover. Not too long ago I acquired an old hard cover edition, this one is saying my collection. Ialsoplan at some point to do a reread of it.
Reading wise, it really is worth the effort.I enjoyed the Silmarillion from the first time I read it when it first came out.
Certainly some of it took a little effort to get through, and keeping up with all the names was hard at times(*). But not the creation story at the beginning, which I loved.
* Thank goodness (or just Christopher Tolkien) for the appendices and family trees at the end.