Why did my friend "gift" this to me? Why am I friends with them at all. What terrible people for giving me this book. FYI, I made it through half of it and couldn't read anymore after being bored to tears. I can see why Laurence Sterne self-published this. (Yes, originally self-published. Thanks 'Forward' for explaining that even back in the 18th century, it was too garbage for publishers back then and its existence was partially designed to troll the public and be a flippant remark to society at large. It's basically self-insert criticisms.)
The plot itself is light, and not expansive. And while the English and its perspectives is older, and bit harder to enjoy for my tastes... what really killed it was this was the author's thinly-veiled attempt at also marketing the sermons he published. For over 20 pages, one of the characters literally reads a sermon diatribe that fell out of another book, verbatim. The book is a lecture, within a lecture, failing to get anywhere. The whole idea that it's novel that the character isn't even born for the first few chapters, as if we as readers should marvel at the absurdity, is not interesting. The marvel here is how anyone can enjoy it.