good about it)

In my Cold War youth, cleaning one’s plate at dinner was a moral imperative since it was somehow linked to starving children in India or China. Even if the connection eluded me, it did reinforce the notion—grounded in the belief of our Puritan forebears—that tasks were to be completed, and one must proceed in life avoiding half-assed, slipshod work. After all, a job, we were reminded, is only worth doing if done well.

For the well-intentioned reader, bent on self-improvement, there is a similar Puritan ethos at work, a guilt over books unread, but worse is a book abandoned midstream. Not only does it suggest moral laxity, but it confirms any doubts people have regarding their own intellectual prowess. The French word poseur comes to mind along with lightweight. Self-loathing ensues. It would have been better to leave the fat tome under the tree and regift it, although there is a reasonable chance the book in question was regifted from the start.

But I am offering absolution, the only absolution I can grant after serving History’s muse Clio for forty-two years. And it’s this — youdon’thave to finish the book. History books are the most common to be put down because they tend to be long, and prolixity poses a challenge to one’s resolve. So, this is my suggestion: try reading a chapter and then proceed or not. History has so much to give that reading that one chapter is vastly better than not reading at all. For starters, it makes life worthwhile by contextualizing our existence in a seemingly unforgiving universe. Even if only a little bit.

Victrola before taking on Moby Dick. Likewise with history. If the subject is European exploration, listen to the baroque folias of 16th century Spain; if your interest is the Civil War, a marvelous collection of Civil War songs interpreted by contemporary artists came out in 2015 entitled Divided and United; if your interest is ancient and medieval World History, check out Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road series. Also, reserve a comfortable seat and pour your favorite beverage. If a family member insists on playing a noisy podcast, tell that person to use earphones—you have reading to do!

In a magazine ad for the International Paper Company, American wit Steve Allen wrote a short piece on “How to Read the Classics” (in 1980, there was still a healthy respect in popular culture for intellectual engagement). Allen thought reading required a proper frame of mind before embarking on a text. For example, he suggests queuing up sea shanties on the

We can trace the origin of historical writing to ancient Greece in the fifth century BCE Herodotus (484 BCE—425 BCE) wrote his histories so “that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time.” It’s strangely random—a history of the Greek-Persian war along with a travelogue of the ancient world from Egypt through the Persian Empire to Scythia. Some of the sources and exotic stories make parts of the Histories suspect. Nevertheless, it’s the first (and one of the best) examples of narrative history, the notion of history as story. Thucydides (460 BCE—400 BCE), the counterpart of Herodotus, is considered the father of scientific or analytical history, which through rigorous research and varied sources, attempts to answer the question of why events occurred. In his The HistoryofthePeloponnesianWar, Thucydides (who had served as an Athenian general) argues, “What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Historians often get lost in their own minutiae, but Thucydides gets to the essence of the problem in one of the most poignant observations in historical letters.

History books tend to comprise both narrative and analysis. It’s fair to say that books written by professional historians for academic publishing houses reside more on the analytical end of the spectrum while popular histories published by trade presses have a more narrative bent. Yet, the best history transcends categorization. Barbara Tuchman was not an academic historian, yet her work on the start of World War I, TheGunsofAugust, won a Pulitzer Prize for both riveting narrative and trenchant analysis. The biographies of Antonia Fraser (MaryQueenof Scots), Ron Chernow (Hamilton), and Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin) were all written for a public audience but are not wanting in rigorous analysis. Two books on the surface that seem esoteric, and perhaps too clever — Modris Ekstein’s RitesofSpring (a cultural history of WWI and its aftermath) and TheMetaphysicalClub by Louis Menand (a story of ideas in America) are so beautifully written that one can withstand the complexity of the content. Some books concentrate on a singular event like Eric Larson’s chronicle of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain, TheSplendid and the Vile. But don’t be put off by sweeping narratives like Mary Beard’s SPQRAHistoryofAncient Rome that provide that sense of continuity amidst change over time.

Which is what history does—it reminds us that human nature, even in centuries of great strife, changes very little. No doubt attitudes evolve, the Victorian world of my grandparents, for example, was very different from the 1960s America that shaped my own worldview. Yet individuals of every generation experience the whole range of human emotion from love and loss to hope and disappointment, which sets up the paradox of looking back to another era and saying of humanity, I am and am not that person at the same time. As a species, we have suffered war, pestilence, and disaster after disaster, yet have somehow prevailed. Perhaps that makes reading history, one chapter or many, worth our time. Even if only a little bit.

ClioLiftsCanvasforImagesof HistoricalEvents, 1784 and Clio, 16011652 are courtesy of Rijksmuseum.