There are five chapters on genre, one each for fantasy, modern, sci-fi, horror, and supers. The rest of the book is primarily a GM’s section. We left off last time at the end of chapter 10: optional rules.
That’s still hefty for a simple rules lite system, but it’s not unreasonable and this system is frankly better thought out and more resistant to rules-lite issues than your standard 8 page free PDF so an extra evening or two of reading seems like a good trade to me. That cuts down the recommended reading to only about 65 pages with plenty of extra material to skim/flip through/read at your leisure. In the GM section you can safely skim the Creature, NPC, and Cypher sections, mostly for ideas (93 pages) but I would highly recommend you read the final chapter: Running the Cypher System (43 pages).
You really only need to read the section of the genre chapter for the genre you want to run (8 pages or so) and can skip the rest (~30 pages). You probably want to go over these more when you have time, they have a lot of extra information and cool options, but they’re non essential if you positively MUST game tomorrow night. If you’ve got the basics down you can run a game right away. If you have a little experience under your belt or are comfortable winging things, you can also skim chapter 9: rules (36 pages) and skip chapter 10: optional rules (11 pages). There are a lot of cool options in there, but NPCs and monsters are more of a simple black box than player builds so you won’t be skimming through the player section looking for the perfect ability for your next NPC and if you don’t want to be bothered pre-vetting anything, you can really get away with just reading the Descriptors and Focuses your players want to use to make sure no one’s building a cyborg for your medieval romance campaign (and really, if that’s your problem you probably haven’t communicated your premise quite right). As a game master, you can safely skim most of the character creation section (140 pages) rather than read it in depth.
But, if you’re interested primarily in pushing through and getting started running a game, there’s a lot of material you can safely skip. I feel I can now adequately speak to those concerns: Everything in the book is worth reading, even the parts you won’t use for your game. Given that the claim of the system is to take a lot of work off the plate of the GM, I was initially concerned with the size of the book (416 pages). With this installment, I’ve finished reading the Cypher System book.