18) An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin

I got this ages ago, as it promised to be an interesting investigation of the history of how humans relate to each other. Unfortunately it isn’t; it is a series of conversations with French women, one by one, with an attempt by the author to draw universal conclusions from each one individually. the translation probably doesn’t help, but it’s a bad idea in the first place. I got through less than a tenth of it before I reached my “Tonstant Weader fwowed up” moment, when one of the interviewees confided that

When someone broke her favourite teapot, she did feel anger for two minutes, but then she said to herself, ‘Everything has a life, everything has an end.’

Well, that was certainly the end for me.

ETA:

artw

  points out that, sadly, this book is not a translation but was originally written in English, so there is no point in making allowances for the author on that score.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: The Gunslinger, by Stephen King.