I saw that there is animal death listed as graphic for this book, can someone advise just how graphic are we talking? Middle grade is hard sometimes for me because it can be so dark. For comparison I had to abandon the How to Train Your Dragon series because the animal harm/death was too much for me towards the dragons. Any advice to navigate this one and if it could be skipped or not would be appreciated.

Fans of the series or casual readers: do you read the appendixes after Return of the King? Do you only read certain ones? Are they essential or just more information?

I know major fans must read it for desire to stay in the world longer but seeing as I’m most interested in the story told of the fellowship and the ring I’m deciding if once the chapters end I too decide to stop.

Anyone else struggle on what to put for total pages on the tracker/posts? Like the book has X number of pages, but the last several are a glossary or acknowledgements or a preview for the next book. I like to read those, but many don't, and I'm arguably done with the book even if I never read that. So if I exclude those pages my percentage is truer to where I am in the story, but if someone else is including them, my percentage will show as later than theirs and I'll end up seeing spoilers, but if I do the opposite then I'll be posting potential spoilers "early". I've landed on excluding them as it's better for tracking and for spoilers tags for others, and then I'll need to account for that when reading other forum posts. But interested to hear what others do.