The Boredom of Reading History Books

Mainstream history books are too long, with too many facts, presented in a too-straightforward fashion... For all their facts, there is often no coherent or abiding "truth". And maybe I need a mixture of both, when reading about the past; a sort of stylised history, true and informative but not prosaic.

Darragh McManus' criticism of mainstream history (via Moby Lives) seems fair and right to me. He's talking about popular, Waterstones-friendly books (like The Court of the Red Tsar), but there's not as much of a gap between these books and many of their academic cousins as we might think. There's actually a reciprocal influence. After all, academics want to be popular too. But readers - the kind of people who buy history books in Waterstones - want to be, well, a little bit academic. Think Peep Show's Mark, with Rubicon on his desk and pick-up lines about Stalingrad. Am I being too snobby, or generalising too much, when I say these people think 'facts' and 'history' are basically cleverer than fiction, which is, commensurately, for girls?

And you know, I bet your Waterstones history readers read like academics too.* That is, they don't read a history book like you'd read a novel. They read pages here and there; they dip in where they think it might be interesting. They get what they want, then it's back on the shelf. So it's irrelevant if books "simply spool out information, doggedly and relentlessly – and often very samey information at that." That's even kind of the point. If the structure was more complex, if the presentation wasn't chronological, if the book spent time creating an atmosphere or a peculiar internal logic, you'd have to read it like a novel. And men don't like novels, remember?

The question for historians is, to resist or not? As with all publishing, there's a dialectic about bowing to or trying to shape public taste - or, in practical terms, you do what the publisher tells you. But if we're talking about what a history book should be, should it be more like a novel? Should it be, basically, less boring - less full of relentless information, more shaped by voice and atmosphere, more interestingly structured? And, behind that, the question: do those things actually help to create "abiding 'truth'"?


* To add another insult to the history-reading public, I'll question whether most of the books sold actually get read at all.