Walton begins by warning the reader that she can’t really write short stories.
She’s...not wrong. Which is not that say the book isn’t interesting or that Walton’s “narrative as intellectual exercise” doesn’t work, because it works extremely well, even when the story is just a joke (see Jane Austen’s Letters to Cassandra for the absolute best of these).
This book is a cabinet of curiosities, curated to provide one fascinating snippet after another, but leaving the question of whether it exceeded the aim of its parts or diminishes them through decontextualization wide open.