Finish It. I can't remember if I got bored the first time I read LOTR, it was high school in the seventies, and I probably read it as fast as any of my extra-curricular reading. If I did get bored, I didn't drop it (a vice I've exercised with few books), but finished it and was rewarded with the superb anti-dénouement (The "Scouring of the Shire" chapter, in which the hobbits exercise their skills in saving their own turf). Jackson and Co. left this out of the movies, thinking it too much conclusion for even the extended edition of the final movie.

Another reason...a third of third book you hold in your hand is the rather lengthy appendicies - purely a scholarly read - that explains many back stories in oh-so-greater-detail. So you're closer to the end than you think.

For a couple of decades, I read the trilogy every June. An hour or so a day, with a frosty mug and a comfy chair, for a month would get me all the way through the whole thing. Some years I'd follow it up with the Silmarillion, which reveals Tolkien's word creating brilliance.

As you read this last book, know that it was largely composed as letters to his son serving on the front of WWII. Tolkien himself lost many friends in the Great War of his generation.

Tolkien also is known to have worried a great bit about the timing of celestrial events described by his scenes,(mobius award claimed) making sure the moon was correct from scene to scene.

His lanquage changes through the trilogy, moving from a slightly more mature version of the Hobbit, to the far darker stories of earlier ages of his created world. The tone moves from the sing-song syntax of the encounter with Bombidill to the formalized-myth speech of the climax. He wrote many of his histories as epic poems, and this starts to seep out during the final chapters of Return of the King. I think it is that change of the style of prose that catches new readers and drives them to set the story aside before the arc has reached its end.

So I'd say finish it. Sit on a poach with a cold beverage and let it play out. The movies were great, I'm a big fan, the Hobbit Movie comes out next December, the Hobbiton Set is simply perfect...But they are not the books.

Tolkien's story is better.