Sorry if this is not appropriate for this sub, please direct me to the right place to post this.
Besides the fact that characters don't keep coming back from life, reading history for fun feels for me a bit like getting into comic books since any story you're reading has a bunch of events preceding it, but those issues were out of stock at the book store. Many of them are literally decades old. You also have a bunch of characters that are important to the story but not always explained because there is an assumed knowledge from previous issues. It all gets a bit hard to keep track of and its why I struggled to really get into comics.
I'm having a similar issue with history. Now I'm your regular pop history nerd. Sabaton, Total War, Paradox games, Dan Carlin, you name it. Recently, I've been trying to make a concerted effort to read some "real" history books, however, I can never find a point to start with any topic I'm interested in. I want to read about Napoleon(ic wars), but I need background knowledge about the French Revolution to properly understand Napoleonic, but I need background knowledge about the Seven Years War and the political hegemony of Europe before the 1790 to understand the French Revolution and on and on and aaaaaaah. What do?
Also history books in general are (understandably) pretty rad about name dropping and I find myself easily getting lost when some dude Bob Hobnob VI was mentioned 12 pages ago in passing but becomes important now but he is not explained now so I'm thinking "who tf is Bob Hobnob VI?"
Well there are a few things to note here.
First off, even professional Historians only ever specialize in a very small slice of a specific event/topic-- that's the only way to get to a point where you can know as much as possible to start making informed advances to a field. If you notice, flairs on this sub are usually pretty narrow. For example I am very well versed on the French Revolution, but I quality that as only 4 years of the main "Revolution". I am not entirely ignorant of what comes before or after, but that's where I have the most knowledge.
Now to your point about feeling like you have to go back to the beginning of time essentially to fully understand everything, I think you're thinking about it the wrong way. So just using me again as an example, I love reading about the French Revolution from 1789-1794 especially, but most histories go through Napoleon's coup. I then for some reason am not much interested in Napoleon, but I like to pick back up at the Bourbon Restoration and then the July Monarchy. Me being more-or-less ignorant about the finer workings of Napoleon's reign do not make me any less able to understand what's happening 15 years later.
To use your example, I think maybe you need to focus on "What is important to know?" The Seven Years War is pointed to as a large factor in getting France on the way to Revolution, which is my wheelhouse. But I've never studied it in depth because I don't need to. Here is what I know about it:
I don't know what Prussia did, I don't know the details of the treaty, those are the facts that I need to know to understand the French Revolution on a deeper scale. You do NOT need to know the political hegemony of all of Europe in order to read about the Napoleonic Wars, and just by reading about them you'll probably start to pick up a lot of it. Don't think of History as a comic book series, think of it like the 19 Avengers movies that are out now, the characters shift, and there is a thread of some story in there, but it's mainly just pretty colors and exciting action scenes.
As for books, make sure you're not trying to find super deep scholarship, especially because they tend to leave out background info. A good place to start is the AskHistorian's booklist on the sidebar: ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books) a lot of us flared users also have booklists in our profiles here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles
Lastly, remember that History books are still books, therefore there will be authors you don't like. I can read a book on the most interesting subject that I already know a bit about and have my mind numb 5 pages in. Play around until you find authors you like to help get you into a subject!