Can’t recommend a book I’ve read, but I’ve had J.M. Roberts’ The New Penguin History of the World on my reading list for a while now. It’s more big picture than facts.
If you’re after rulers, dates and the like, just diving into wikipedia, starting from high-level articles and taking your own notes might not be a terribly bad approach.
If you’re after rulers, dates and the like, just diving into wikipedia, starting from high-level articles and taking your own notes might not be a terribly bad approach.
I actually expect that this is a very good way to approach learning world history.
Is the fact that it’s been on your reading list for some time but you haven’t read it a strike against it? E.g., does it indicate that it’s intimidating rather than engaging?
No, it’s just indicating that I haven’t made any sort of concentrated effort at clearing my reading list or maintaining some sort of FIFO discipline on it. The Complete History of the World in Impeccable Engaging Detail tends to not do very well against a Warren Ellis comic book about shooting aliens wearing human skin suits in the head with flesh-eating bullets when picking random media to consume during idle time.
Yup, understood. (My own to-be-read shelves have maybe 350 books on them, and I have the same failure mode where mind candy gets consumed faster than meatier fare. If it actually is a failure mode, which maybe it isn’t.)
Can’t recommend a book I’ve read, but I’ve had J.M. Roberts’ The New Penguin History of the World on my reading list for a while now. It’s more big picture than facts.
If you’re after rulers, dates and the like, just diving into wikipedia, starting from high-level articles and taking your own notes might not be a terribly bad approach.
I actually expect that this is a very good way to approach learning world history.
Is the fact that it’s been on your reading list for some time but you haven’t read it a strike against it? E.g., does it indicate that it’s intimidating rather than engaging?
No, it’s just indicating that I haven’t made any sort of concentrated effort at clearing my reading list or maintaining some sort of FIFO discipline on it. The Complete History of the World in Impeccable Engaging Detail tends to not do very well against a Warren Ellis comic book about shooting aliens wearing human skin suits in the head with flesh-eating bullets when picking random media to consume during idle time.
Yup, understood. (My own to-be-read shelves have maybe 350 books on them, and I have the same failure mode where mind candy gets consumed faster than meatier fare. If it actually is a failure mode, which maybe it isn’t.)