Last year I read almost 50 books. I haven't kept up that same pace so far this year, but let's say that I can average 50 a year from now on. Since I expect to live another 32 years, that leaves about 1,600 books to go. It may sound like a lot, but with over 200 already on my Amazon wish list, I don't have time to fuck around. So this year I decided that if I discover a book is a dud early on, I'm just going to drop it without finishing. This idea sounds obvious, I know, but to start a book and not finish it has always offended my mania for doing a complete job, so I've done it only very rarely. No longer. YOLO. And more to the point YO read a finite number of books. You better make them count.
I didn't get very far with Robert McFarlane's Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Portentously written, it just seemed to ramble on with truisms about how humans like to hide things underground. Then he got lost in a cave. This reader at least never made it out.
I also started The Travels of Marco Polo. This promised to be more interesting at first, since the hero of pool tag is a more interesting character than I realized. He was not simply some random Italian merchant who posted his vacation on Insta. Marco Polo first went to Mongolian when he was just 17, and he spent the next 17 years as one of Kublai Khan's court functionaries. Shortly after he returned to Venice he ended up in a jail in Genoa where he dictated the book. So the author is at least as much Mongolian as he is Italian, which changes my image of him substantially. He is not your typical tourist. Unfortunately, he is your typical boring writer. The Travels reads like the exact opposite of a tall tale. As he moves from city to city, he describes the trip and the people in prosaic terms that focus mostly on what they grow and manufacture. After about the fifth city you get the picture. He makes the fantastic voyage feel about as exciting as reading an outdated 10K.
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