I'm not a fan of Tolkien; I read the
Lord of the Rings books and didn't really like them. But maybe the
Hobbit is better...I never read it.
As far as books for younger kids, my favorite was the
Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. It had a cool concept, and was pretty well written. I particularly liked the descriptions of first-time morphs.
Other series that I read (and still read) were
The Seventh Tower and
Keys to the Kingdom, both by Garth Nix.
For the
somewhat more mature reader, I like the Star Wars novels; I own all of them except the newest. The only one I really didn't like was
Children of the Jedi, but I loved the X-Wing series, the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, the Thrawn trilogy, and
Traitor (which is the only book I really liked that occurs after Vector Prime).
Also, I just started buying the old
Battletech books. The
Legend of the Jade Falcon trilogy is awesome.
Oh, and the
Robotech books are pretty cool, too. I still have to find (if I remember correctly) about five more of them, though, and they are hard to find.
PS: I read the first four Halo books, and thought they weren't
that bad. I particularly liked the space battles...MAC guns for the win!