LOTR...Yes or no?

So I'm thinking of reading the 3 over the next month or so...

Good idea? I've never seen the movies or anything and the references to LOTR are getting annoying. ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO MORDOR HURR and I have no idea what that shit is about.

Do I read them? Is it worth it? Also going to college next month, any books I MUST read before I leave?

Also, I'm gonna read Flowers for Algernon because I remember a loonnnng time ago (like at least 8-10 years ago)I read an excerpt/short story and I was really interested in it. I want to read the whole thing.

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I think this is largely a matter of taste and interests:  for me, coming from a background steeped in Greco-Roman mythology, the style of the council seemed and seem perfectly appropriate (and I may say that it remains one of my favourite passages).  The Iliadic comparandum is appropriate here too:  some have seen the Catalogue of Ships (Bk 2) as tedious, long-winded, etc.;  to others it is a vital part of both the oral formulaic heritage and the structure of the epic.

One point that is open to dispute is the idea that the Homeric audience would have been interested due to personal connections.  This might be true to a limited extent, but it doesn't explain the interest overall;  and I think that has more to do with a cultural interest in genealogy (just look at the complexity of mythical genealogies as presented by Apollodoros, Hyginus, and the scholiasts [ancient annotators of ancient literature]), with the importance to oral cultures of keeping records in verse as it were, and with traditions of catalogue poetry (Hesiod, and Apollonios Rhodios' catalogue of Argonauts, for example - which is a Homeric-influenced catalogue in a poem written in and for a highly literate milieu).

Again, I think one has to read the council and such in light of Tolkien's narrative influences and agenda.  He viewed Middle Earth and its narratives not as an ad hoc fictional creation, but more as a series of histories and tales that revealed themselves and evolved as he worked on them;  and that is how the works are written.  In the same way, he did not just create names and words as needed, but had whole linguistic systems (again evolving) underlying his world - and these had the same stages and inconsistencies as natural languages.

Of course, one might understand all of this and still feel some sections to be tedious, unnecessary, etc.;  however, it is important to understand the genesis of Tolkien's style and what he was trying to achieve - for him, LotR was in some senses a diversion from his serious writing, which he set into its context, and into which he put elements that point to the wider world, histories, languages, mythologies, etc.