A few pages before the light goes out
I used to read novels before bed, the kind you can lose an evening to, but somewhere in the last few years my attention stopped holding a plot past two pages. What's stuck instead is history, oddly, chapters I can pick up and put down without losing the thread, since the thread is thousands of years long anyway and forgiving of a few missed nights.
I'm partway through The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt now, a few pages most nights before the light goes out, and it's the first history book in a while that reads more like a story being told to me than a list of dates to remember.
Kẹo asked once what I was reading, and when I told him it was about pyramids and pharaohs, he wanted to know if there were any good fights in it. There are, occasionally. Enough to keep him listening for a paragraph or two when I read a bit aloud.
What I didn't expect was how much of it felt familiar in an odd way, families holding onto power, a homeland reshaping itself over generations, people trying to build something that would outlast them. None of that translates directly to my own small life, obviously, but reading about a civilization stretching itself across thousands of years makes a slow Tuesday evening feel less like nothing is happening.
I keep it on the nightstand rather than a shelf, which sounds obvious, but the books I actually finish are the ones I don't have to go looking for.
Some nights it's three pages before my eyes give out. Some nights it's twenty. Either way it's still there the next evening, unbothered by how little progress I made, which might be the real reason I've stuck with a history book longer than any novel in years.
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