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.

Just a clarification on >>37.  Probably the best known medieval traditions featuring knights in the English-speaking world are those surrounding Arthur. Such a figure and stories about him first appear in writers (mainly Latin) in and on the British Isles, but only really begin to be developed to the forms in which we know them after the Norman conquest by British and French writers (beginning especially in the 12th century), and only then appear in German, and during this period become associated and elaborated with various other elements (legends of Merlin, for instance).  Tolkien worked in this period, of course (editing and translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example), but his linguistic and literary interests and expertise as a scholar, and his influences as a writer, extend back into earlier periods and languages, including Old English (whose period ends in the early to mid-12th century) and the Norse material that survives in the Eddas (but parts of which are thought to go back centuries earlier).