Not all that similar Tolkien's works, but I highly reccommend The Belgariad by David Eddings.
Now that I think about it, it is a tiny bit simmilar to LoTR, in a way..
edit:
It got a quest for a lost relic of legendary proportions, yup.. pretty much like LoTR..
It got lots of travel through half a dozen kingdoms.. kind of similar to LoTR..
It got an old wizard-like person who is equally as important as the main character.. That too..
And some other things I am afraid to spoil too much..
But yes, it is somewhat like Tolkien's books...
The Belgariad (and the other, what 4? series that follow it) will indeed keep a body reading for a year straight. They're a bit different than LOTR though in tone and style. Characters are written in a much more personable way than in LOTR (where everyone is a bit starchy), but it gets overdone. Everyone in every single book Eddings has written is a smarmy wise-ass, the women are all rather imperious and cranky figures (who are also quite snarky) and after a time character personalities tend to blend into one another. Plus it pulls Deus Ex Machina out of its ass as a primary mover of the plot.
I like David Eddings a lot but over the years I've kind of become jaded by how he wrote. The multiple series are all epic, but I think Tolkien still has a better world that is more classical. While Eddings is more...conversational. Still, there are some great parts to his books. I love the 3 Troll Gods. Eat, Kill and ****.
Two series I'd recommend in addition to Eddings is
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. Another epic series that inspired one of the most bad ass movies Disney ever made (The Black Cauldron.) It's another tale of star-crossed heroes and the journey from boy to man.
The other would be the
The Riftwar Saga (and everything that follows after it) by Raymond E. Feist. It's closer to what I'd call modern fantasy, a more adult version of David Eddings. While it's closer to a world based on an epic D&D campaign than Tolkien's high-falutin fantasy, it has very rich characters and spans generations of the world, bringing back characters from previous books as their older, more bad ass selves until they finally pass and their children take over. I think it's up to 4 series and at least 12 books.