Have you ever tried reading the books in the original? My experience with classes in Germany tells me most haven’t. As ‘The Lord of the Rings’ also falls under the category of a classic, you can actually read it for free online (which is something you can do quite nicely with a tablet PC).
Below I copied some lines from http://readfreeonline.net/OnlineBooks/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring.html so give it a try. You might find the reading is not as difficult as you believed.
In 1981 the UK radio station BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatization of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings in 26 half-hour stereo installments which is really great. It’s not an audio book but an audio play, so the characters are acted out (by British actors) with a narrator telling the story in between dramatized scenes.
The Lord of the Rings : A Full Cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection)
