Agreed, I’ve heard that Dune has been used for examples in English classes of how NOT to write, because the story and world is often engaging enough to get the students’ interest, but is still filled with mixed metaphors, confused tenses, tautological descriptions, and sometimes the subject of a sentence will change from clause to clause.

The thing with Tolkien’s diction is that it shifts as the story progresses to other areas of Middle-earth. It’s starts off with a rather comfortable, discursive 20th-century style for the Hobbiton scenes, and when the action shifts to other areas the diction becomes much grander to match, like the Medieval Gondor or the Old English Rohan. Sometimes he will purge his writing entirely of words not derived from Old English sources, which truly makes it feel like you’ve travelled to a different place, and in The Return of the King especially he has a very elevated tone, compact, declarative, unafraid of inversion, with a very satisfying balance of iambic and trochaic pulses (it reads well aloud). You’ll also notice that when Aragorn throws off his persona as Strider and assumes the mantle of King of Gondor he often starts speaking in Homeric dactyls, the rhythm and cadence of the heroic Epics, whereas if the Hobbits were ever to start speaking in verse rather than prose it would probably be in common iambs, there are lots of little touches like that that endear LOTR to me.

Like most people here are saying, it’s not for everyone, which may be why so few fantasy writers copy Tolkien’s stylistic strategy in this (they’ve stolen plenty of other things of course). Most fantasy writers show their world by simply railroading you from place to place and then throwing a bunch of invented history at you, but I personally thought that Tolkien’s method with language was the only one that actually made you feel like you’re in a different world. People who have read lots of older quainter books or large epics usually do better with Tolkien than people hoping to curl up with something cosy. Personally I prefer being thrown out of my comfort zone when I read something new rather than just curling up with something that will give me everything I expect a book of its kind to do. It sounds like you’re not going to get out of The Lord of the Rings what Tolkien put into it, so there’s no shame in putting it down and reading something you think will be more worth your time. There are so many masterpieces out there to read that I think you would be doing yourself a disservice if you instead spent your time on a book that didn’t give you anything in return.

I really liked the sci-fi writer Adam Roberts's description of Philip K. Dick's writing -

"A sense of something hidden, something underground and flourishing in the interstices, like bluebells growing in the cracks of the pavement (or blooms of mors ontologica in amongst the corn) energises his fiction. It's this something that has kept his books alive when better written, better structured and better plotted novels have fallen into obscurity around them. Which is to say that critics can, and do, point to evidence of hasty writing in Dick's works, patches of ragged or inexpressive prose, or occasional addled-head-ness in most of his books (he took a whole bunch of drugs, after all). But even with all that, or conceivably because of that there is a quality that PKD's books possess that few other books, in or out of genre, can match. It is a sort of fascinating aesthetic uncleanness, resonant and enduring. More polish would have rubbed that quality away."

Taken from this review if anyone wants to check it out.

I didn't think he was going for "realism", although he did write it in response to a children's adventure story called The Coral Island. You're not wrong at all to disagree with the themes running through the book if that's your take away from it, but I didn't see anywhere that Golding was saying that human nature was inherently callous and bloodthirsty without organised society, I thought he was just saying that those feelings are inside us. In a way they hardly do better than the adult "civilised" society, where there's apparently a big war going on (Golding served in WWII, which really disillusioned him as to his belief of the goodness in humanity).

I think it's very interesting that a lot of people think it's a book on book censorship, because Bradbury himself stated numerous times that he meant it to be specifically about how television can rot your brain. As a result, I think a lot of us go away from the book with a different message than the author intended.

I read somewhere that he was inspired to write it because he saw a young woman walking down the street with a transistor radio next to her ear, and he thought this was terrible for some reason? I don't know, maybe he patronisingly assumed she was listening to a mainstream soap opera rather than a science programme or something, it's a strangely anti-technology position for a science fiction writer to take. I feel like he mistook the medium for the message, as both books and television can be either enlightening or manufactured garbage; his is a doubly mixed message considering that he had his own TV show.