While I think that's true of a lot of books, with Tolkien, one of the main reasons he is so beloved is the quality of the prose. The downside of this is that a lot of the writing is spent in description, or in retelling old legends, and other pieces of fluff that do not advance the narrative or tell us much about the characters we're following. I do believe that if you were to skip over this because you find it boring, you would be missing out on a large part of why Tolkien is special.