The Two Towers suffers from the Jan syndrome. It's the middle child, and one that wasn't even meant to exist. Tolkien didn't intend
The Lord of the Rings to be a trilogy, but rather one whole book, so inevitably the second volume was doomed to have no true beginning nor a satisfying finish. When I first read it as a teen I didn't enjoy it much at all, and it's still not my favorite of the three, but having read it again recently I warmed to it. It provides an admirably strong bridge between the first and last book, while including some very memorable moments and revealing interesting background details, all of which I think are sometimes forgotten when comparing the quality of the three books side by side.
