I think the idea is that the individual chapters can stand for themselves, but that means that there's a lot of repetition going on if you read them in quick succession. Which I found a bit annoying, i.e. I don't need to be reminded of the different translations of הבל numerous times, and there were a couple of other paragraphs that appeared more or less verbatim on multiple occasions. Most of the chapters are really nice to read though (and who doesn't love to hear about Iceland?).

Oh, and for a book that wants to nerd out about different old languages so much: hippocampus isn't latin.