Knuth his self offers the mathematics as something that is not for all readers. There are also the 40+ rated exercises and the historical accounts. In volume 4a there are even 40+ rated exercises entailing finding the errors in historical approaches to combinatorics.

Not that that’s anything I am doing. But I just pleasurably whiled away a couple of hours reading about satisfyability and Horne and Krom clauses and Boolean median functions. The section on Horne clauses had some interesting implications for expressing bnf like grammars in Prolog and the Boolean median functions gave me a different way of thinking about consensus. That’s what happens when I pick Knuth up and why I keep doing it even on the thinnest of pretexts e.g. this.

Anyway a backbone is a backbone. Not having fingers and toes and elbows doesn’t change that.