As do I! And Pope now and then. Tastes vary.
I tried the Master and Commander series last year, and only made it a few books in. Didn’t care enough about the 2 main characters, and the technical sailing descriptions were more than I desired.
Gee. I love LOTR (basically memorized it as a preteen), also the Aubrey Maturin novels despite a loathing of boats, AND 19th century Russian novels.
Makes me happy to think of three things in a row that I like. So rare.
Honestly, I would have urged Tolkien to delve even more deeply into the history and significance of the places and people he wrote about. Not a popular idea, I know.
But I might have kept most of the singing out of it. Most, not all.
I suspect some people would argue that’s exactly what he did in The Silmarillion and the various Unfinished Tales of the Second Age.
This isn’t the exact same thing, but I’ve always struggled a little with the way the land is massively reshaped through the first and second ages. It’s very difficult to find any meaningful geographic continuity between the people who populated a region in the Second Age versus those we get to know in the Third Age. The fact that he wrote as much as he did about the various battles and kingdoms in the north and west but next to nothing about those in the east and south is a problem.
Of course as with all things fantasy you can fanwank this if you want, but if you want to indulge in the true “world building” you can’t really get around it.