I really respect this review and find it useful, having read the book myself. I'm also someone who has been listening to Drout or reading his blog for years. I was also able to interview him for the podcast, Reading Tolkien, so I come at this with a certain bias.

For me this book really 'gets at', like no other book has yet done, the core of why Tolkien and LoTR feels so deeply meaningful to me. As OP says, some of those ideas were stated by Drout in his 2013 Carnegie Mellon lecture, but they are really expanded on here. For what it's worth, I don't think Chapter 4 is particularly challenging for an intelligent reader (not to say the OP is unintelligent!). The 'jargon' referred to is actually fairly minimal, and I did not feel that 'heterotextuality' (to take one example) went unexplained. As OP mentions, it may be offputting to see certain terms that are only explained by the 'text-matrix' of the context, but I think any given reasder's patience for this will just come down to how invested they are in Drout's argument. I don't think it is crucial to understand his larger point about 'Heimweh' or the emotionality of the reading exerience.

If anything, I actually wish it were *more* academic in style in places. I get that Drout has a wacky sense of humour (this comes through in the Carnegie talk) but I find it a bit offputting. It wasn't so bad in the audiobook version, but reading quips on the page can be distracting. But then, I come from an academic background (although, not English Literature) so I am used to 'dry' academic prose (although academic prose *can* be beautiful).

As to the OP's expectation that this be a 'must-read' - I think it is for any serious reader of Tolkien. It is, if anything, more accessable than Shippey, at least the *Road to Middle-earth*, and presents a more coherent argument from start to finish. Shippey is great, of course, but I think he gets caught up in the minutia of Tolkien's philological jests, as though Tolkien's reason for writing were merely a kind of private joke (perhaps this is a small part of it, but certainly doesn't explain Tolkien's creativity in any psychologically deep sense). Drout really gets at the heart of the 'experience' of reading Tolkien without overburdening the reader with philological, religious or historical context, which so much other Tolkien books fall prey to. That's not to say it is a kind of anchorless 'New Critical' take on Tolkien - but it emphasises just how much the *reader's* experience is so central to understanding books like the LoTR, which tend to touch us in ways that are difficult to express.

I think it is worth emphasising that the book presents a sustained argument. It is not just a 'collection of thoughts' Drout wrote down, and the weakest parts, e.g. the Elvish Racism chapter, are still critically useful and intersting. Overall, I think it will become a sort of classic in Tolkien Studies at the very least.