Words are inadequate

Huh. I thought The Godfather as a book was fairly mediocre - it's one of the works that led to my rule of thumb that if there's both a book and a movie, usually at most one can be great (some notable exceptions include Fight Club and The Big Sleep, but generally). Not that I thought it was bad - just that several of the subplots dragged, and the Liz Taylor thing was stupid, and so forth.