Dreaming by the Book Book

As a brand new writer, I was excited to find this book in the Army Library. The book promised to study and explain how authors bring imagination to life. I had hoped to find help in becoming a better descriptive writer. I did not find any such help here.
To illustrate her writing, I'll include these sentences that occur early in the first chapter which tell the purpose of the book. "Phrased another way, only by decoupling "vividness from "the imaginary" (where we unreflectingly and inaccurately place it in many everyday conversations about aesthetics) and attaching it to its proper moorings in perception, can we then even recognize, first that the imagined object is not ordinarily vivid, and second, that its not being vivid is tautologically bound up with its being imaginary. Now it is a remarkable fact that this ordinary enfeeblement of images has a striking exception in the verbal arts, where images somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects, and it is the purpose of this book to trace some of the ways this comes about." To say such writing is tedious would be an understatement. Elaine Starry my do a bit of tracing, but for me there is no help in understanding the subject here.
My first inclination was to return the book immediately. But I slugged through it, hoping it would have some usefulness. Unfortunately, that was not to be.
The review in Publisher Weekly's makes this observation, "In the long sections of the book devoted to the habits of a certain sparrow in Scarry's garden, or to charting every reference to vegetation in the works of Homer, Flaubert and Wordsworth, Scarry appears lost in her own lush imaginative world." I felt the same but would add that she does little to help explain or describe that imagination. IMO, Dreaming By the Book is little help to understand writing or imagination.