Going Down In History

I'm trapped.

It all started in December 2006. That was the last time I went to India for a holiday. On the rare occasions that I holiday in India, I like to fill up my time and my suitcase by shopping for books. That is the one thing that is still much cheaper there.

I'm also a bit obsessive about "collecting the full set" of anything. I'm a sucker for boxed sets, the full trilogy in one package, that sort of stuff.

So if you put these two impulses together, and then place me in front of a book called The New Penguin History of The World, I turn into putty. Very silly putty.

A historian named J. M. Roberts set out to write the enire history of the human race, from the time before there even was a human race, all the way up to the present day. Before he passed away in 2003 he took the story as far as America's war on terror, and Nature's newly uncovered war on mankind via global warming. Such staggering ambition deserves to be rewarded. I snapped up the book without a second thought.

The cover blurbs described the book as "A stupendous achievement.." and "A work of outstanding breadth...". But they left out the fact that it is stupendously boring. Here's a sentence picked out completely at random: "Political democracy developed faster than social, on the other hand, even if the universal male suffrage already long-established in the United States would not be introduced until 1918; the democratization of English politics was already past the point of reversibility by 1870."

That was from the 782nd of 1184 pages of unrelentingly turgid prose.

And I cannot stop reading.

You see, I've trapped myself inside this paperbacked prison. I started reading the book three or four times, and each time I gave up within the first fifty pages of multiply-nested subordinate clauses. Eventually I started thinking of the book as a living adversary that was determined to prove I'm too stupid to read it. It was disturblingly like the feelings of clumsiness and inadequacy that dogged me through high school.

"This", I told the fat snob sitting on my bedside table, "is now personal. I will defeat you". No I didn't. I'm not yet deranged enough to talk to books; only enough to feel intimidated by them.

So I made one more attempt and this time forced myself through the polysyllabic sludge with bloody-minded determination. I was an invincible hero forcing my way through dense enemy ranks. I was a fearless explorer trudging through an arid, oppressive desert. I was a moth wading through molasses, and about equally elegant.

But more successful.

I have now bludgeoned my way through six hundred pages, and just about passed the halfway mark. I'm winning my struggle against my inanimate adversary and it's doing me no good. In one of history's more savoury moments, the Greek king Pyrrhus commented on his own losses after winning a battle: "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone". I can empathize.

Finishing the book will probably destroy my surviving brain cells, and leave me a gibbering idiot who is unaccountably knowledgeable about seventeenth century European power struggles. Finishing the book will probably take me another year; evry time I open it and start reading, I fall asleep within ten pages. Even so have I made my way to this present pass, reading three pages a night before passing out with my nose pressed into the binding.

It's in front of me now, just lying there inertly. As if I don't know that in a matter or hours it'll be in my hands again, gnawing away at the edges of my consciousness.

I swear to you, the next book I read will be a graphic novel.