(* Less happy to say it's mostly because I've been cripplingly depressed but hey, reading is reading)
(* Less happy to say it's mostly because I've been cripplingly depressed but hey, reading is reading)
More British old-timey adventuring, though without so many ships.
If you want an antihero-rake and a tale told tongue firmly in cheek, see if the Flashman novels by Fraser are to your liking. Fraser takes a rich school-bully character from a more wholesome series of books and imagines his military & adventuring career in adulthood.
I juts counted, 44 books so far this year, with lots of variation. Not
I can not say much about quitting the social media, as I never really started. Just HN, and some youtube (always start on my subscription page, only some late nights do I look at the main page with its algo suggestions). The occasional computer game (from doom to chess). Some hobby coding (retired couple of years ago), music, and yes, lots of reading.
So the difference, to me anyway, is the heavy use of archaic and naval terms in the Aubrey-Maturin series. As I went through them they got easier, and I'd certainly find them more lightweight now, but still.
The Silmarillion is hard in a different way - sort of like George Martin and ASoIaF, it's rather long-winded and name-heavy, so it can be hard to follow, even for avid Tolkien fans.
Still, Tolkien has a style of writing that I just love. No other author I've read manages to capture the feeling that you're really reading a myth or a legend, and not "just" a story.