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 ;(