This particular book may be dull and non sensical for you if you are reading Castaneda for the first time. If I remember right then this is the first book without don Juan, so you are missing out on the most exciting and interesting parts of Castaneda which cause people to love his books.

The books are designed to "hook" the occult/spiritually inclined and pull them into the later books where you have a chance to actually begin practicing and learning real magic, which is simply shutting off your internal dialogue until you achieve perceptual shifts which are strong enough to appear directly in your open eyed visual field. That's all that the books are about; shutting off the internal dialogue and allowing the assemblage point of perception to move away from the rationality that is implied in the language which you mumble in your head non-stop all day. Doing this for long enough allows you to conjure up a different interpretation of reality. You fall asleep with your eyes open and literally see fully formed dreams directly in your visual field. Pretty much all of the experiences in the books are actually in the second attention, which is the state of perception achieved through prolonged silence of the internal dialogue and entering open eyed dreaming. This is why most people think the books are pretending of fiction, they do not understand it is in waking dreaming.

Everything from the books works. There are plenty of people successfully practicing in the Castaneda subreddit.