So I stumbled upon a YouTube video called Why Isn’t China Collapsing? (spoiler alert: the video does not actually offer an answer), and the podcaster vtuber Mr. Beast meets Zeihan knockoff host, erm, hosts an “expert” on China (I put quotation marks on it because I’m not sure anyone is an expert on anything these days–I mean, I’m not even an expert on napping, but I have studied it for hours a day for decades). And the expert has books behind him. Which I look at closely, of course, which is how I spend my time on Zoom meetings when I can. Which is not often, because young people on Zoom meetings these days have so few books.
To our left (his right), I see a nice, dust-jacketed set of The Story of Civilization. Mine is a mishmash of former library copies, some with dust jackets and some without. I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in 2023, speculating I could finish the series in a decade if I read one a year. But, oh, gentle reader, I got bogged down in The Life of Greece last year. And just earlier this year, I bought a copy of The Age of Voltaire in Nixa, and I put the lesser copy on the free book cart at church, where it has languished for over a month.
To his left, our right, I see Battles and Leaders of the Civil War which looked awfully familiar. I might have a set of those around here, inherited from my beautiful wife’s uncle eighteen years ago. I see that the “expert” has them shelved out-of-order though.
You know, I should step away from the computer here and sit in the reading chair to work on some reading stamina if I ever hope to get through these two sets plus Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln (4 volumes), Churchill’s history of World War II (6 volumes), Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples (4 volumes), and Ben Wolf’s “Ghost” trilogy (3 volumes).
