I recently read this book for freshmen year english and contrary to a lot of the posters, I found the beginning interesting. My only problem was that my teacher soon required us to read something around 100 pages a night. Normally, this would have been easy, but because of my other homework, I couldn't keep up. I had to resort to Sparknotes, supplementing with the actual text online. I found that this works really well (hint, hint to anyone fallling behind, because it's even worse if you don't even know what happened). Fortunately, I was already half finished when I stopped reading the actual book. I did get lucky in that I got to keep the book and I hope to read it sometime. I must admit that after hearing the few people who managed to read it talk about some parts, I did go back and read those. Still, I enjoyed it, even in Sparknote form (which often isn't as good).