I'd say the game is just as good as the books, the unabridged versions, anyway:
>Verbal diarrhea of the typewriter ensures you know more about the trees in the Old Forest of Buckland than you do about the trees in that Rush song about the Oaks and Maples.
>Whole paragraphs dedicated to the lineages of everybody, even the goddamned pack mules.
>The progenitor of the ubiquitous pure evil dark lord trope.
>Saruman and Grima are confronted by the Hobbits at Bag End when they come back from Mordor. Saruman has been going by the name "Sharkey" to fuck with everybody in the Shire. The director's cut of Jackson's Return of the King concluded their characters a lot better.
>Weapons have names like people and they're referred to like they're actual characters.
>Deus Ex Machina eagles.
So yeah, I don't see why you would like the books so much.