LotR: Not as good as the movies

I don't know about anyone else, but I found JRR Tolkien's book really dull and reading it was a real chore.  Big props to Peter Jackson for turning it into a highly watchable trilogy.

The ending of the books was an anticlimax. It was also amazingly annoying.

I will never understand why they are held in such high regard. The world was carefully developed and linguists will enjoy a fair bit of the material, but the pacing was poor and the characterization ridiculous. If you ripped the plot and characters out you could transplant them in a children's story. Yet the book is too dense for a child. So what exactly was the target audience?

Certainly, it's modelled quite well after some classic epics, but it's a bore as well. I suppose they're like Ulysses: completely overrated.