That's interesting. It's hard for me to tell what's easy anymore (Pinker's curse of knowledge) in this area. I do think Pearl's book isn't very hard compared to a lot of other math books, though. For example, I find "Unified Methods for Censored Longitudinal Data and Causality" a ton harder to read.

Naturally, I have a lot of arguments for reading Pearl, but my strongest argument against reading Pearl is that he doesn't tackle statistical issues at all, and they are very important in practice.