The Lord of the Rings
The ur-text of modern fantasy. Tolkien's three-volume epic created the template (secondary world, invented languages, full cosmology) that virtually every fantasy novel since has responded to, positively or negatively. Its influence is total and irreversible.
The first hundred pages before the Fellowship even leaves the Shire are the great stall-out, “such a chore to read” that one reader counts “more than 100 pages just to leave to go on the adventure.” Tom Bombadil divides people hard, defenders calling him a breather, others calling the whole episode dead weight a normal edit would cut. The songs get skipped outright, one reader saying “if I could skip the songs and poetry I would be done.” The women have almost no agency, present as symbols for the men around them. Post-colonial readers flag good and evil mapped onto racial and geographic coding that has not aged well. And the ending winds down long past its climax.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
