The movies complemented the books very well. My favorite fantasy books. I’ve read them a number of times.
I read them at least six, perhaps eight times when I was in my teens, and really enjoyed them, as did so many others. I dropped fiction about 1985, reading one sci-fi novel (thanks to a tip from a FReeper) in a decades-long interval. When the Fellowship movie was imminent, I dug out and re-read the trilogy, skipping certain parts that I'd sometimes skipped in the past, and that I figured wouldn't make it into the movie (the whole Old Forest / Tom Bombadil / Barrow Wight sequence, for instance). I found there were parts that I remembered that hadn't seemed to make an impact on my younger self took me by surprise by being quite moving.