Hello everyone,
I recently bought two books:
A Brief History of The Magna Carta
I find them very difficult to read. The books go into extreme detail, almost becoming a chronicling of minor events, rather than a narrative of their respective topics. What I really want to read about/take away is an understanding of the significance of these subjects, and knowing bureaucratic details doesn't really add to my intuitive understanding of these subjects.
Am I reading the wrong books? These are very different from my previous experience in non-fiction, but I would still like to read them.
Is there a better method to reading history books of this kind, or am I wrong to read these books recreationally?
EDIT: Wow! Thanks for the insightful advice, much appreciated!
Am I reading the wrong books?
In the case of Ottoman Endgame, possibly, depending on what your level of interest is?
Ottoman Endgame is the best book I've read on the subject of WWI in the Middle East, and I've read a fair few. I like it precisely because of its level of detail.
That particular subject is that it's one that is incredibly attractive to monolingual English-speaking non-regional-specialists who want to write about, say, Gallipoli, or Lawrence of Arabia. And there's quite a lot of material in English to write about so you can have a book as huge as David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace (635 pages) which is composed entirely from English-language primary and secondary sources.
The problem there is two-fold.
One, it's obviously not the whole story. Just as no historian would dare to write a history of the Western Front without recourse to German-language sources, it's actually a bit shameless that so many do so without even an attempt to access Turkish- or Arabic-language sources (even if it's just hiring a couple research assistants.)
Secondly, by doing so, the entire narrative of the war (in English historical writing) for a very long time was shaped by the judgements and biases of those English language sources. The British at the time constantly failed to rate Turkish combat abilities and despite all evidence to the contrary often failed to recognize that even after the war. So for instance, starting at least with Churchill's history of the war there's been a "Lost Cause" narrative around Gallipoli, that, for example, if only they had done a bit more they might have been able to force the straits. Aside from the problems in that assumption, then what? Basic assumptions of the British commanders (like that the people of Istanbul would welcome the British fleet as liberators, which predicated a lot of the assumption that "forcing the straits" would even be strategically valuable) have gone unchallenged in a lot of the accounts that I'm familiar with.
The other aspect is that many of the issues involved in these discussions, particularly around the peace agreements, is of critical importance to get correct down to even the most minute choice of words. I can understand why a lay-reader would find that excruciating, except that so much of the popular history written on this gets it so spectacularly wrong. This can even include seemingly big, important issues, like this utter drivel that was published in Foreign Affairs in May of this year about how the Sykes-Picot agreement was about oil pipelines.
So if so many get the obvious facts wrong, it's unsurprising that so many get the minute details wrong about, say, the precise date and timelines of the Ottoman entry into the war or the debates over the wording of Britain's war-time promises and post-war settlements.
So what to make of this? Ottoman Endgame is the right book if what you want is a highly detailed book on the subject. Despite that, McMeekin, too, seems to have made rather important mistakes on details and in precisely some of the issues of language specialism that I critiqued above.
That being said, it's certainly better than anything I've come across as a non-Ottomanist/non-Turkologist in terms of those details. There might well be better books published in Turkish, but I'm not familiar with that material.
But that doesn't mean there aren't more accessible books that are still very good.
For the general reader, Eugene Rogan's The Fall of the Ottomans is probably a better (and shorter) option. Fromkin, despite my qualms, is a damned good writer and there's a reason why his is the best known book on the topic.
Insofar as it's a corrective to, say, T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom or Churchill's The World in Crisis those books might also well be necessary background reading to understand why some level of correction of the historical narrative was even necessary. They're also wonderfully written.
So I wouldn't say it's the wrong book, but for your purposes there may be others you would enjoy more if you only wanted to read one book on the topic, like Rogan's.
I wrote up a little guide for a series we did last fall:
I also find it useful to take notes, but be careful not to get bogged down in minor details. (And most of them are, in fact, minor details).
Good luck!
It really depends on how much of a deep level you want to understand what you're reading on. Jumping right into an academic level book might not be ideal, if you don't have a pre-established interest and some sort of a notion about the area of study. I find it ideal to read/be inspired by some good piece of pop history on a certain subject - while being vigilant of the necessary simplification and often outright mistakes - and then, when you know you want to know as much as you can, dive into the harder stuff. For one thing, it will create context for the minutiae you describe, that will give them more of a meaning.
When and if you get a real drive to learn about certain subject, you will find the details to be the fascinating part. I am most definitely not a historian, so here's the gigantic grain of salt, but that's the path I see going from reading good pop history to secondary to primary sources. I don't know how many people would be interested in the exact recipe for Wine of Iron, but right now I have The Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America from 1820 open and am reading just that, having gone the literature route I've described.
There's a really beautiful feeling that comes up when the tiny details click into the larger picture. To get that, I absolutely agree with /u/sunagainstgold about taking notes. I like to highlight stuff myself and revise the highlights over and over, if I want to learn something. As far as memory retention goes, it's important to realize that no information will stay in your mind for long if it's not attached to anything.
According to the modern interpretations of memory function, we're creating networks of concepts and the less "nodes" a particular concept has coming out and in of it, the harder it is to call upon it. So you need the context to truly internalize some pieces of information. Organize and elaborate is an easy motto when it comes to learning. Retell what you've learned to yourself and check with the facts if you missed something. Also, form questions and see if you can answer them. Just the formation of a question does help to organize the information within your mind. And hey, some of those questions might end up on a certain subreddit, where you can learn all sortsa stuff. Again, I am not a historian by any stretch of anything, but it is my honest view and opinion on these matters. I apologize if my rambling will cause more work for the mods.