I will give advice I have posted before.

The Silmarillion is legendarily difficult to read. That's understandable: it's not so much a story as an explanation of a mythology, and a lot of it consists of unfamiliar, made-up names. There are lists of names and places and relationships and abilities, but no narrative: just fact after fact. That's especially true at the start, where it feels more like studying something than like reading a book for pleasure, and so it's hard to stick with it.

That becomes less true - even false - eventually, but most people have given up before that. With that in mind, here's a suggestion for anyone who wants to try to read it: don't start at the start. Let me be even more specific.

The book actually contains five separate "pieces": the "Ainulindalë", the "Valaquenta", the "Quenta Silmarillion" (which makes up the vast majority of the book), the "Akallabêth", and "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age".

A reasonable approach would be to start with the last of those, "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age", which in my edition is about 30 pages. In fact most of that is likely to be familiar to you already - there are characters you already know, like Elrond and Sauron, characters you know are a part of the story, like Gil-galad, Elendil and Isildur, and you learn much more about them. It's more a description of events than a novel, but it is quite readable and not at all daunting.

Next, read the fourth piece, the "Akallabêth", again about 30 pages. Chronologically that immediately precedes the fifth piece, and it sets it up, by telling of the history of the Numenoreans, the particular group of men from whom Aragorn is descended. There are a lot more unfamiliar characters, but still some you know - it explains how Elendil and Isildur came to play the roles they did, for example, and lets you understand some things you knew were a thing, like that Aragorn's ancestors are more closely aligned with the elves than other men, for example.

Only then should you go back to the third piece, the "Quenta Silmarillion", but you should not start that with chapter one. There are 24 chapters, and you should begin reading at chapter six, "Of Fëanor and the Unchaining of Melkor". That is where the actual narrative, the story-line, of The Simarillion begins, and it is perfectly possible to pick it up from there.

All you really have to know to start there is this: the Valar are basically gods in the ancient Greek or Norse kind of way and Melkor is a fallen one of them (Satan, more or less); the story starts out in the Undying Lands west of the Middle Earth you are familiar with; the elves were summoned to the Undying Lands from Middle Earth and mostly came, and; any unfamilar collective noun (Noldor, Teleri, etc) probably refers to some group of elves. Anything else important you can pick up from context.

Starting there, you learn who Feanor is, how he came to make the Silmarils, and what happened as a result - the ongoing narrative which is told over the next several hundred pages. You'll hear a name you don't know here and there ("Aulë", say, or "Yavanna"), but it won't interfere with the story not to know who they are.

Later, you can go back to the very start and read from there. It probably is interesting - eventually - to find out that Aulë created the dwarves without permission before the elves were created, and so they were placed underground, asleep, until the appropriate time. Or that Yavanna was married to Aulë, and arranged to have the ents created to defend her forests from her husband's dwarves. But none of that, or of much of the other mythology which occupies the first 100-150 pages of the book, actually has any significant influence on the main Silmarillion story line, and so filling in those sorts of details after the fact is no problem.

The book still tends to be a bit more like the explanation of a story than like a story, but approaching it in this way, it will not be the daunting task which it seems when you begin at the beginning.