>>>>Yep...that's right...it's more fantasy. I don't like that genre at all. I stay away from things with faeries, elves, dragons, etc...even LOTR.
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>>>LOTR was like reading for school to me... I read it because I felt I had to, just because everyone else has. In the end, I didn't quite get what was all the fuss about?
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>>>Incidentally, one of my daughters had to read Beowulf for school (which I have never read, wasn't in our curriculum), and then when I finished LOTR she read it. Her conclusion: a retelling thereof, i.e. LOTR is more or less a repack of Beowulf.
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>>The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road) is another fantasy very similar with LOTR. Kay worked with Tolkien on The Silmarillion, and I believe he wanted to write in Tolkien tradition. Apart from having to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, I enjoyed both.
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>I thought Fionavar was one of the best fantasies I'd ever read, and his later stuff was also dynamite - lest fantastical, but complex and excellent, and he can be an amazingly visual writer.

I'd give a plus to Fionavar over LOTR, but don't ask me why. I read Fionavar by accident, my daughter gave me the first book, and then I found the other two in an used book store. Unfortunately this is all I read from GGK, and LOTR is my only reading from CT. I'd like to read more, but it is harder and harder to find time to do what I have to, and then some of what I'd like to. Maybe I like too many things ;)