If your interesting in the back ground history of Middle-Earth, I definitely recommend the appendices. The stuff in there ranges from Dwarven history before the Hobbit, to Family trees of the Kings of Gondor to a copy of the Shire calendar, and the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. So I recommend skimming it to look for stuff that interests you.

I tried reading the Silmarillion, but it's pretty dense. Imagine reading Genesis in the King James Version, and not knowing of any of the characters or events before hand.

I'm not saying the Silmarillion isn't good, it's just I wasn't able to read it through very quickly and had to put it aside because I had other books I need or want to read. Having read several Shakespeare plays and Fahrenheit 451 (although Shakespeare is pretty easy for me to read, Fahrenheit 451 not so much), I agree with you that there is value in works that are dense, it's just that they're harder to get through than books that are more "readable" (Other works I've found dense include Frankenstein, and both are good works of literature). I want to read the Silmarillion, it's just the book is dense and I have a habit of reading three books or so at a time, that leads to me dropping a book for several weeks until I can't get characters straight (The list of these books is very long, including 1984, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Game of Thrones, and Winston Churchill's Second World War memoirs, all of which I need to finish at some point).

Today marks the 10th anniversary of The Return of the King in cinemas, way back in 2003. As a winner of 11 Academy Awards, I'm pretty sure it's very well-respected in the film community. I was kind of hoping they would put the film back in cinemas for a one-day only special screening. But, it didn't seem like they were really planning on doing so.