I gave up. Halfway through volume six of the eight volume history I couldn’t take it any more. Smith’s history is just a bunch of collected quotes strung together by bits of writing. I was in the middle of a chapter called The Farmer’s Revolt, on the reaction of farmers to the high prices of shipping their produce and the low prices of the produce itself. Smith went off into a tangent of quotes from some novel by a “Christian Socialist.”

I suddenly realized I was reading with the goal of finishing the book quickly so I could go on to something interesting. It occurred to me that Smith’s method took six pages to tell what a good writer could say in one. I closed the book and got up and walked around. For a while I felt guilty — after all, I was about 5,500 pages into an 8,000 page series. But this morning I feel freedom.

Just for the record, the first two volumes A New Age Now Begins, on the Revolutionary War are very good. But I wouldn’t recommend going any further.