Oh Silas, I always lol when I read the contest at Mt Carmel in Kings, it conjures some pretty funny mental imagery XP
Read Watership Down. I think the movie would have been so much better if it were 2 hours long, encompassing all the maturity and detail of the book. I was also a fan of the Redwall series, which is basically Tolkien with animals, be it aimed at a younger audience. I like books that are absorbed in their own world with their own timeline, history, languages, a large cast of characters etc- they make perfect sense within their own context and the world they are set in is whole, and so believable in that sense. There isn't too much spoonfeeding of every detail trying to explain to you what's going on; you don't have a narrator telling you every detail of what is going on in real life so I find books that 'assume' you've caught on to it's way of speaking/thinking or remember recurring themes more immersive.