Finished in July 1989, over a year after The Two Towers, which I do not recommend as a reading schedule.
What the films cut is the part that makes the book what it is. The war ends with a hundred pages still to go, and the hobbits come home to find the Shire industrialised and occupied. The whole point is that you cannot go back, and that the damage follows you into the place you were trying to protect.
Frodo does not recover. That is not a flaw in the ending.
