I must admit that I cheat a little - I read the Peter Watson at work and when I come home I am guiltily blazing through the second book in a vampire trilogy...so it may take me a bit to get back on track.
As far as I can tell this will be the biggest downside to my new job. sitting alone and unhindered cataloging stacks and stacks of books. I was given a PDA as a perk and to date it seems to be a mobile "things to read list" that can conveniently be carried up into the stacks for quick reference when browsing the shelves. I catalog books, PDA faithfully at hand and create a list of things I want to read! I'm trying to be good and will return the Watson before I indulge in anything else (at least - ahem! - from the university library)
I actually checked and Watson goes on for 1015 pages. I'm not sure my non-fiction interest level can hang on that long - but so far so good. Today I made it through the author's notes, introduction, prologue and into chapter one! It starts as a rather fascinating look at "pre language" ideas. The author's note was a really frightening list of other sources I should be reading, which we kindly appreciated and patently ignored. The introduction is a survey of what others have considered to be the most important ideas in history...and the interesting discovery that most people group these ideas or phases into groups of three or more. My personal favorite (let's see if I can type with my tongue jammed into my cheek) is Thomas Carlyle's list "the three greatest elements of modern civilization are gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion." still giggle about that one. The author has decided to group his ideas into the soul, Europe and the experiment. The soul being of more consequence than god in this particular sense and the idea of Europe rather than the place on map. There is a note to Arthur O. Lovejoy at Johns Hopkins by way of celebrating his ability to drum up interest in the history of ideas.
The prologue starts to illuminate the discovery of time in history. There were camps of course believing that Genesis was the guide book on the creation of the world vs. scientists who were discovering very quickly that those dates couldn't possible be right. With the early discovery of animal fossils and possible stone tools this leads us nicely into the first chapter which starts in Ethiopia 2.7 million years ago. So far pre-language ideas include bipedalism or walking upright, the use of stone tools, more refined tool creation, fire, cooking and so forth. Interestingly the brain sizes of these people increased whenever a new shift presented itself...There was a note about burying the dead. From the mass majority of artifacts, fossils and civilizations unearthed - the number of people that they can undoubtedly say were "buried" is astronomically small - and the majority of these were young boys.
The table of contents - which Alita says is a novel in and of itself says I have a few more ideas in chapter one yet (cave painting and Venus figurines!) so I will keep reading the "ideas" and moderate the posting of them :)
