breaking the stall

 Sometimes I get that way about certain books. Either it's a part I find upsetting, or I get bored with it, or I get annoyed at one of the characters, and I put it aside for a while.

(This is different from "I am annoyed at the author's style or where they are taking the story," that's often when I don't finish a book)

I got that way with Between Two Rivers, which is that history of the Mesopotamian area and specifically cuneiform writing.....which I think might be among the earliest, if not the earliest, form? And the first part was interesting with the "mystery" about whether Ennigaldi-Nanna really had a "museum" of things even more ancient than her own ancient times or not...

(And an aside: Another mindblowing thing to a non historian is to be reminded of how LONG the Egyptian culture stretched in ancient times, like how the Sphinx was as much older than King Tut's tomb as the fall of Rome was to Gutenberg's development of the printing press in Europe - but non historians like me tend to think of "ancient Egypt" on this compressed timeline because it was so long ago)

And there were some interesting ideas about how ordinary life might have worked, and what their religion was like, and the fact that women priestesses were apparently not uncommon......

And then I hit up against an episode where she wrote about two cities at war, and something like 5000 to 10000 people were slaughtered (and of course, each side would have their own narrative about what happened)

And she described the "tell" (burial mound) that one side erected to bury the dead of the other side. Maybe for reasons of honor? (though given that the remains show evidence of having been left exposed for a while, maybe it was actually for stopping-spread-of-disease-and-scavengers reasons) and.....they erected a stele with vultures on it, and that was what got me. ESPECIALLY reading it during a new war ramping up in that part of the world (Through really, hasn't it always been at war, more or less), and thinking for a few hours last week that "if things go very wrong, this might be how humanity goes out; one person drops a nuke, and another country - not Iran, they don't have one currently - decides "oh, that's how it's going to be" and drops one themselves, and then all that's LEFT are bones and cockroaches. And that just got me down, and made me sad and scared, and I had to stop thinking about it.

So I read mystery stories for a few evenings and as I noted one of them broke kind of bad (though perhaps it was a very specific horror - essentially, being buried alive - for me)

But last night I went back to Between Two Rivers and manged to push through the upsetting bit into something calmer. I don't know that there won't be more hard stuff to read but maybe I can get through the book now.