I have read volume 1 cover to cover, worked through the "easy" exercises in the 1st half of the book. But the MIX simulator excursions were frustrating for me, as it seemed to be an incomplete project, and based entirely on Knuth's imagination, and not a real, working platform (at least at the time I read it).

I do not own volume 2, but poked around a bit in the sections with random number algorithms, as they have always fascinated me, since the time I wrote my own crude ones, in Pascal, back in the 1980s ;(

All the volumes are a good read - just skip the maths and assembly sections in the first book. The rest of the work is understandable/readable without them.

Skip the maths?! I bought volume 4 because the math was interesting. I just skip all of the coding bits. Reading Knuth, for me, is similar to reading Martin Gardner's books.

I don't understand this comment. Why do you care?

I'm just saying, those books are impossible to read cover to cover.

I've read volumes 1-3 cover to cover (I even picked up a cheque along the way).

I wasn't reading for maximal knowledge retention (e.g. I would rarely do any of the exercises, though I would read them all and think about how I would solve them), but now I have a pretty good idea of what is in there and what isn't.

They're not meant to be read cover to cover, the same way you would not read a dictionary cover to cover. Knuth himself even says so in book 1.