However, I have met a LOT of people who enjoyed fantasy but didn't like Tolkien, and it was obvious that the reason was because Tolkien was too literary. By "a LOT of people" I mean that when I was growing up, I played a LOT of Dungeons and Dragons with geeks in four different states of the US. They loved the Dragonlance books, a lot of them even liked Narnia when they were younger, and they also read a whole bunch of other books that were far more low-brow than Tolkien.

For the record, when I said these people don't like Tolkien or Lem because the book in question "isn't what I was expecting", I mean that the book was too literary and, because it wasn't as derivative and formulaic as what they usually read, they were disappointed.