Long books, like large bureaucracies, can easily get bogged down in a ba­roque layering of summary within summary. The United States House of Representatives has a Committee on Committees (I kid you not), undoubt­edly embellished with subcommittees thereof. And we must not forget Jona­than Swift's famous verse on the fractality of growing triviality in scholarly commentary:

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite 'em

And so proceed ad infinitum.

Thus every poet, in his kind,

Is bit by him that comes behind.

Stephen Jay Gould, The structure of evolutionary theory, p. 53