It's not a light undertaking: the four books (although it's often recommended that one skip the fourth because it really isn't necessary or especially great) are slow reading, not the least because of the modernist styling. My copy ended up hugely annotated because I had to look stuff up on nearly every page. So it's half reading a novel and half a research project. But because of the historical depth of the writing, by the end you have a fairly interesting grasp of the period. I enjoyed it, but I'm willing to invest in a worthy book and have made a sort of hobby of reading excessively long, slow books.