A Pesky Dilemma

How is it that the short, episodic chapters in Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) worked so well for me as a reader? Ever since finishing Anthony Doerr's mind-blowing novel a few weeks back, I've been trying to land on a satisfactory answer to that question, given how bite-size chapters in many other books have predictably annoyed me over much of my reading life.  

"Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one - that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes." 

Could it be as simple as the reliably rich insights found throughout Cloud Cuckoo Land?  Perhaps, though I do wonder if worthy insights in some of those other books were overlooked simply because I got put off too quickly by bite-size chapters, especially when the prose wasn't as muscular as Doerr's.

Doerr divides his 622-page masterwork into twenty-four parts, each prefaced by a brief passage from an ancient text by Antonius Diogenes, which itself tells the story of a shepherd's journey to a utopian city in the sky. From there, this gifted author further divides his narrative across three time periods - 15th century Constantinople, 2020, and the near-future - using the stories of five well-developed characters, via individual chapters devoted to their interlocking stories. For me, the architecture was both challenging and thrilling. Did that contribute to my higher tolerance for those short chapters? Perhaps, although again, I do wonder if this kind of structure in a more traditional linear story might have struck me as gimmicky.  

I'm reasonably certain better minds than mine have published well-researched critical theories teasing apart distinctions between best-selling page turners that use episodic morsels vs. books of literary merit like Cloud Cuckoo Land that utilize a similar cadence. I guess my next step is to educate myself to some of those theories. In the meanwhile, I'm curious to know if my pesky dilemma sounds at all familiar to readers out there. If yes, please share with me what conclusions - if any - you've drawn.