I've been trying to read E.H. Carr's What is History? and Richard J. Evans' In Defence of History for a matter of months now. Both have been recommended to me for University applications but I just can't seem to get into them or hold my attention. In comparison, I found Hayden White's Metahistory and many journals by Carlo Ginzburg to be enthralling and highly though provoking.
Does anyone have any advice on reading or interpreting the larger and more general historiographies such as Carr or Evans.
This might not be 100% useful, but... honestly, I don't know many people who enjoy reading those books. It's the sort of thing you have to get through sometimes, I guess.
Having said that, Carr was writing in the 1960s and the discipline has come a long way since then. You can find those ideas better synthesized in subsequent works, and the only reason to read WIH is because it's expected that you know the argument of that specific book (if you're looking for inspiration, for whatever reason, it's probably better to look elsewhere).
If you want a better/more recent reflection on the evolution of the discipline, I'd recommend you skip the older texts and pick up something like Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto (and it's free!). Since you're applying to university, I see no reason why you should force yourself to endure the boring, dense, dull books... at least until graduate school.
I did exactly the same type of thing when applying for Oxford in November. Its dreadfully dull but useful. Here are some gobbits that are much shorter that my school provided which actually came in quite useful even if they were a pain to read. Hobsbawm on History chapters 2 and 3. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory (8/1, 1969). Edward Said, from Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Herbert Butterfield, from The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). My only objection would be that all of this stuff is often very old and very, very dry, seconding /u/NotLouisMalle. If you wanted to do some more I would recommend having a look at some more modern stuff like "After Tamerlane" by John Darwin (a recently published example of world history which is one of the newer developments in history right now). While Tamerlane focuses on broad movements "The Man on Devils Island" by Ruth Harris has an intense focus on the individual and has extensive documentation and archive work to back it up. Both are excellent and highly rigorous and might be of better use to you than dried out historiography.