I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I had worked through MTW's Gravitation first, so I wasn't totally new to the material - also an excellent book, if you've got months to spend on it and some more lightweight general relativity books to look at as supplements).
It probably depends, though - when you say "newbie", do you mean "F=MA means nothing to me and I barely passed single variable calculus", or "I got straight A's in vector calculus and excelled at freshman physics through basic quantum mechanics but never took more"? If it's the former, you'll want to grab Feynman's freshman lectures first, they'll get you thinking right about this stuff if you make it through them, and later you can start to worry about stuff like tensor calculus...
Be warned, it might not be the best book for beginners, and in all honesty it's more a math book than a physics one, but if you feel at least somewhat math-competent, it's worth a read. At least I enjoyed it a lot.
Roger Penrose's "Road to Reality" is great for an overview in one not-so-compact book. It's a bit hand-wavy, admittedly. The neophyte problem, and reason we have universities, is that "you don't know what you don't know." Penrose's book and t'Hooft's curriculum get you some part of the way to knowing what you need to know.
One more option is Lev Landau's series. They're dense but fairly readable for graduate-level tracts.