You're not the only one. In college I took a compilers course and we used the dragon book, to me it sucked the joy out of the magical concept of making a compiler.

Some years later I (re-) discovered Forth, and I thought "why not?" and built my own forth in 32-bit Intel assembly, _that_ brought back the wonder and "magical" feeling of compilers again. All in less than 4KB.

I guess I wasn't the right audience for the dragon book.