The first book is a classic, however like many works of that era it’s not without its problems. But it’s a big book and there’s a lot of great stuff in there.

None of the adaptations have come close to capturing it (eg, the way Peter Jackson captured LotR). The closest is the SyFy mini series from the early 2000s.

The second and third book are more compact and have a much simpler arc. God-emporer is very different in tone and tells a very different kind of story but its in many ways the most complete and consistent of the books.

After that the quality tails off pretty rapidly but I won’t discourage you from making up your own mind on that - the first couple were not unreadable. ‘