Lord of the Rings, Round 4

I am currently re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy after being sucked in by my son Mike into watching the entire movie series over a period of 2 days after Thanksgiving. After watching all three movies (probably the third time), I realized that I had not read the books in 20 years or so. And so it seemed like a good time to do so. The interesting thing about reading the books for me has been to see how really good the movies were. They don't match the book perfectly, but in the places where they differ, the movie version makes for a better visual than the books do. There are a couple scenes in particular. Early in the story, the four hobbits make a run for Bree to meet up with Gandalf to begin the quest. The book version is interesting, but not nearly as exciting as the movie visual of Frodo leaping for the ferry at the last possible moment to outrun the Shadow Riders. In the second movie, the defense of Helm's Deep by Theoden, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli (and a few thousand others) is a major scene. The sequence where they ride out into the enemy expecting to die in battle, only to see Gandalf arrive in the nick of time with reinforcements is a very stirring (and lengthy) part of the movie. In the book, the entire battle is downplayed to a couple of pages. The difference seems to be in expanding the sections of the book that seem to lead to exciting action sequences in the movie. Much of the book is spent in helping us to understand the background of the main characters and the history of the regions and peoples involved in the war of Middle Earth. When I read the book the first time, it meant that I cared more deeply about the characters as I worked my way through the books (enough so that our two cats in the house in Mundelein were named Merry and Pip). When I watched the movie, the character development wasn't necessary - I already cared what happened to them. I would be interested to know if those of you who saw the movies without reading the books felt that something was missing from the movies. I am just starting to read the final part of the trilogy. I am especially interested in reading the end where the hobbits come home to a Shire under siege, which was ignored in the movie.  

As a side note, the New York Times Book section has a review entitled "The Hero is a Hobbit" of the first book in the trilogy, written in October of 1954 by the poet W. H. Auden. He writes,   

The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien's invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is at least as good as "The Thirty-Nine Steps." Of any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory. Mr. Tolkien is fortunate in possessing an amazing gift for naming and a wonderfully exact eye for description; by the time one has finished his book one knows the histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and the landscape they inhabit as well as one knows one's own childhood.