I have read it cover to cover. I found it to be unconvincing concerning the claims made for it by its believers. Anyone who believes that it represents a true history of ancient America is a few neurons short in the brain.
I have also read some other books relating to its credibility and that of its author, Joseph Smith.
The fact is that Joseph Smith was a con man who, before he brought out the Book of Mormon, pretended to be a seer who could find treasures hidden in the ground. Farmers and other gullible people paid him money to find the treasures. He had a peepstone that he used like a crystal ball to locate the supposed treasures and direct the suckers where to dig. His excuse for not finding the treasures was that they were guarded by spirits who moved the treasure through the ground to keep the suckers from getting it.
He was finally tripped up when the relatives of one of his suckers had him arrested as a "juggler," which at that time was the term used to mean "con man." He was brought before a justice of the peace in a preliminary hearing, or examination, to determine if he should be brought to trial. The judge ascertained that there was enough evidence to try him, but he let Smith know that Smith could take "leg bail" and get out of town, but that he was not to return. This took place in Bainbridge, N.Y., in 1826, and the name of the judge was Albert Neely. Several documents relating to the examination have been found, including the judge's bill for the examination. (The initial assumption about the finding about the court appearance was that it was an actual trial and the Mormons made issues about some discrepancies that violated trial procedures. But those procedures and the judge's bill make it clear that it was actually an "examination" and not an actual trial. Smith was labeled a "glass looker" in the bill.) The evidence against Smith was sufficient that, if Smith had not taken "leg bail" and left town, he would certainly have been judged guilty in the resultant trial.
http://www.irr.org/mit/neely.html
Smith then went on and fabricated the Book of Mormon as another confidence scheme. He got his idea for the book from Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, or The Tribes of Israel in America, which was published in Poultney, Vt., when Oliver Cowdery, who became one of Smith's scribes, lived there.
Though he supposedly used a pair of phony spectacles to "translate" the plates for the Book of Mormon, his friends and relatives said he used his seer stone to do so. It was the same stone he used in his former money digging confidence scheme.
Continuing his calling as a con man, when he first started his church he required his converts to turn over all of their property to him. But that caused some problems, so he instituted tithing.
The gold plates never physically existed according to Martin Harris, one of the witnesses and the financial backer for the publication of the Book of Mormon. The printer of the book asked Harris if he saw the plates. Harris replied, "No, I saw them with a spiritual eye."
Stephen Burnett, an early Mormon convert, lost his faith when he heard Harris say something similar. Burnett said "I came to hear Harris state in public that he never saw the plates with his natural eye only in vision or imagination, neither Oliver nor David & also that the eight witnesses never saw them & hesitated to sign that instrument for that reason, but were persuaded to do it."
In an interview with Harris, Anthony Metcalf reported that Harris said, "I never saw the golden plates, only in a visionary or entranced state."
Details about the above information, particularly about the use of View of the Hebrews as the source for the Book of Mormon, can be found in Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon, by David Persuitte. Persuitte presents a very significant number of parallels between the two books.
On top of that, there has not been found one single piece of archaeological evidence to convincingly support the story of ancient America found in the Book of Mormon. In fact, in the 1950s, the LDS church financed "the largest and most ambitious archaeological project ever funded by a religious institution" in an attempt to uncover evidence for the Book of Mormon. It was successful in that it uncovered an enormous amount of archaeological information about ancient America, but as far as providing any evidence for the Book of Mormon, it was a dismal failure. That has not been changed by any subsequent archaeological findings.
That research project is described in Quest for the Gold Plates, by Stan Larson.
In addition, in his book, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church, Simon G. Southerton shows that the American natives show no evidence of Israelite descent, which contradicts what the Book of Mormon says.
One other thing. Joseph Smith had an eye for women, so he used his position to institute plural marriage and he took over 50 wives, some of them the wives of other men.