Reading the first arc, I loved it. Had some flaws, but was otherwise awesome. As someone else said, I really liked Ichigo's hollow form, and pretty much the whole of the first arc was good. Soul Society was new, and a creative way to see the After-life, and the characters seemed slightly different from most series I, personally, had read at the time.
Then.. it stopped. Then I had to quit reading, because it got a) extremely boring, b) I stopped being able to say/read the names of the places and people, this left me with the inability to connect to any of it, much less connect from chapter to chapter outside of "Hey, the big guy.. or the smart guy.. or the .. the guy.." type of things. The characters start undergoing stupid power-up to super-weak cycles that are unpredictable. One second they can beat anyone, next a low level enemy beats them to within an inch of their life..
As far as the anime, it was good until the same place and then the fillers started. I don't need to go into that, because it hurts my head to think of the stupidness. So in the end, read it.. read it until the end of the Soul Society arc, and then stop and never think "What happens after..." and you will be left with a good taste in your mouth. Read past that, and your IQ will drop for every chapter you experience.
Update because I decided to read, since I kept being told how awesome it was again..
My experience: Imagine the DBZ anime, specifically the Frieza arc... imagine that all drawn out into a manga. Now, split it by having each time someone talks, punches, or powers up become a chapter. Thousands of chapters, right? Yeah, this is Bleach as it is now.
"He cut a dozen buildings in half, split the world, and hit the boss! He must be.. must be... dang he isn't hurt at all and he is now powering up a single slice that will mortally wound, but not kill, us! Nooo! I need to power-up!! Okay, oh noes! He beat us all again, power-up!"
They could have made this entire arc like.. 10 chapters of real good story telling, but now it is nothing but fluff with almost nothing happening in each chapter, outside of making the main bad guy more and more God-like (I guess he does fully qualify as a superior God now, though?). Either way, read until Soul Society arc is over, and then close the book and remember the fond memories, because if you read past that.. you won't have any left. You will end up a dried up husk of "I don't care" like many other Bleach readers, who only read the manga still because they need to have an end, an end or a death. Either or.
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