When I moved, I brought over my portable sidetable on wheels which houses the books "I'm working on." Some of them haven't been touched in years.
I decided I really should make some decisions, and weed out those I'll never really sit down and read.
First up, 1491 by Charles Mann. I skimmed it. Yeah, Native American culture was much more advanced than the Pilgrims knew, because 90-95% of all Indians died in the first 50 years after white settlers brought over smallpox. OF COURSE their society looked disorganized and impermanent. I don't need 500 pages of detail.
Next, 1493 by the same author, about how the first wave of "globalization," caused by the opening of successful intercontinental shipping, caused not only the universalization of cultures but also the wholesale destruction of unique plants, animals and cultures unaccustomed to foreign competition. This one might merit a closer skim.
1421 by Gavin Menzies. China reached America seventy years before Columbus. Not sure if they brought the equivalent of smallpox to the west coast.
Consider the Lobster, a collection of magazine essays by David Foster Wallace. Wildly divergent, in style, content & quality. A report on an adult film industry awards show, a review of a scholarly book on English usage, a speech about humor in Kafka, field reports of campaigning with John McCain... Some of the essays were basically unreadable. The titular essay, about whether lobsters feel pain, was readable but overly obvious. This book fairly begs to be left unfinished.
Next up, Bernie Krause's latest tome The Great Animal Orchestra in which he opines -- like every other book he's written -- about the loss of diversity in the wild. Nothing new here, nothing to see. Move along.
Circles (2000) by James Burke. This is Connections updated for the internet generation (using even many of the same stories) but condensed down to 2 or 3 pages each, with no detail or context. Just 50 short whirlwinds. I'll finish it but I won't remember any of it.
The Secret Life of Sleep (2014). A few years ago I suggested to Mary Roach that she write a book about the odd state we (and apparently almost all fauna) spend 1/3 of our life in. She demurred, but author Kat Duff has taken it on. She doesn't have the wit, humor, or weird sense of connections of Roach, but so far it seems like a pretty solid project. Only ten pages in.
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