Is "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" an easy and fast book/novel to read or does it drag a lot?

I read it several years ago, so can't remember the particulars. It's a good book, if you can swallow stories about love at first sight, but there are literally pages and pages where Hugo drones on about architecture. Some people might be interested in French period architecture and feel that it helps them imagine the scene better, but I'm not, and I thought it detracted from the story. After reading several such pages, I ended up just skipping the rest of those parts, and found it didn't affect the story at all.