Popular history books, with a computer in front of you.

"Pop history" is, more or less, the type of history books you'll find at a regular bookstore like Barnes & Noble in the US. Why to start with them, even though they often have some mistakes: they will give you most/all of the background you need to understand.

...Hence the computer in front of you. DON'T look up everything you don't know. Absolutely NOT. But if you get to a part where you're genuinely confused by a section because you've never heard of the Seven Years' War, or you're reading about medieval France, England, and all of a sudden what is this "Burgundy" place? That's when you check Wikipedia.

Next rule: do NOT try to memorize everything, or even anything. You don't learn if you're stressed; you probably won't learn the first time. But you'll pick up some ideas organically, and you'll get used to what it's like to read history.

When I knew nothing about the topic--absolutely nothing--I thought The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes was a fantastic read. It's about early colonial Australia and the convicts who were exiled there. You get a snapshot of (one interpretation of) the lives of Indigenous Australians, the drama of the sailing and the struggling to survive of the convicts, and--really--the criminal scene in England.

It's great. One of Hughes' sources is a dictionary of criminal/underworld slang from 18th century London.

Some other really good but expansive books (i.e. not focused on a single event or something) are:

• Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States
• Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
• Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
• Diarmaid Macculloch, The Reformation: Europe's House Divided (despite the title, I promise, it's expansive)
• Robert Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

Books like those will start to give you a 'framework' for history, as well as what it's like to read it. Just keep in mind that you're always reading an interpretation of evidence--a story.

Oh, and one more thing: if it's boring, stop reading. Above all, you want this to be fun. That way you'll stick with it, of course, but more importantly, history can be fun, and why shouldn't you take advantage of that? ;)

Does this help at all? I'm happy to clarify, or offer further suggestions!