This movie has been my favorite for many years (decades) and yet, I haven't read the book until now. The book is great! It is much more detailed than the movie and the characters are developed much more in-depth, like Santino's and his affair with the bridesmaid who was 'big down there', but so was he. The book covers parts of Godfather II as well, with Michael (Mikele) Corleone being the main character in the second part of the book. Marlon Brando was amazing as Don Vito Corleone in the movie, but the book gives a lot of background on how he became 'a man of respect' in the Italian neighborhood on Manhattan.
The last third of the book feels rushed, as if Puzo wanted to finish it and publish it as fast as possible, so it doesn't have as much dialogue and description as the first two thirds. Apparently Johnny Fontane was modeled after Frank Sinatra who was very angry about the fact. Sinatra was an angry and disagreeable man in general who also like to beat his women, so when he met Puzo in a restaurant he tried to beat him up. What a loser!
Anyway, Puzo wrote only two books in the Corleone universe, this one and 'The Sicilian", so that one is on my reading list now. Parts of it were also incorporated in the Godfather II movie. Puzo wrote the scripts for the movies, so he further developed the ideas from the books and gave them a new spin. Towards the end of his life, Puzo, who was a lifelong gambler, was assuming the role of an elder teacher of life's truths, but there weren't too many takers.
This book really makes you root for Mikele Corleone, but one has to remember that he was a cold-blooded murderer, whatever the reasoning behind it.
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