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I had expected to disagree with this work more but enjoy reading it more as well. If only Rawls could write half as well as he could think... Mostly it's a hit piece on Utilitarianism, which is silly, because even Rawls acknowledged why Utilitarianism can be exploded in a single sentence and isn't actually a viable philosophy: Good cannot be measured (except ordinally) and therefore there can be no summation of good, not as a total good, nor as an average. Period. Rawls says this out loud and proceeds to devote 80 percent of this too-long work to explaining what else is wrong with Utilitarianism. Which doesn't matter, because there is no unit of measure for universal good fungible among different people. He concludes that because his system is superior to unworkable Utilitarianism, it must be awesome. He is wrong about that, because there are other alternatives he left unconsidered.
He insists that Liberty must be the first priority, and it cannot be circumscribed based on arguments over the good of others. The social justice element of his argument must be subordinate and never impact those liberties. Except of course they must. When you take a person's property, that she obtained through a mix of her genius and labor, the basic right to her own mind and body, which Rawls certifies as among the inalienable liberties, to advantage the most disadvantaged group, you violate those very liberties.
Never mind that he breezes right through the most important parts of his argument with barely a sentence or two, never really delving into Liberty itself, never really specifying much about how to penalize the most "advantaged" in favor of the most "disadvantaged," nor even looking into those categories and how to properly define them. Many would consider Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa "disadvantaged," but remember they chose and preferred to live that way. Can we really say that some trailer trash spending their money on beer, cigarettes, Nascar collectible plates, and lottery tickets are not also choosing poverty, although perhaps in a less mindful way? Indeed, Rawls never considers how the "advantaged" or "disadvantaged" got to where they are or if some of the "disadvantaged" failed to work or take advantage of opportunities offered them. He totally fails to meaningfully address the free-rider problem, even if he mentions it a time or two in other contexts.
Utilitarianism broke away from Liberalism and was quite distinct from it, although properly speaking, it was derivative from it. Rawls imagines his system of Justice as Fairness as a breakaway from (unworkable) Utilitarianism, and since Utilitarianism is defunct, his system must be the only workable one. He never considers his system as contrasted to actual Liberalism (or, for that matter, any other real system), which would agree with his first point about inalienable Liberty, but stop without proceeding to his poorly-defined "fairness" that cannot exist without violating Liberty and therefore blowing up Rawls' own philosophy.
Rawls' idea of wealth (consisting of most of his vaguely-described "primary goods") is typically naive ivory-tower ignorance. He displays no knowledge as to how anything is created in the first place, describing material goods as "distributed" rather than created by genius and labor, hence the ease of "redistributing" them. Of course, no system of "redistribution" has ever existed without damaging or destroying the actual system of wealth creation and value-added. Likewise, his notions of "self-respect" seem to anchor more on the external (other people) rather than the self, making one think he's got the wrong idea altogether.
It's amazing such a needlessly difficult-to-read work of little actual value-added inspired Robert Nozick to write Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a response, which is a much more tightly-argued and well-written work, whether you end up agreeing with it or not.
It's also a pity that this is such a poorly-written work, as virtually every social justice argument, policy, and philosophy rest upon this work as a foundation, making it important to understand. Yet Rawls is so long-winded, tentative, and breezy and brief in places where each is totally inappropriate.
I would highly recommend reading others' summaries or descriptions of this work rather than slogging through it yourself. It really is not a good read, although unfortunately it is an important read for politics and policies of our day.