I recently spent three weeks in Panama on my honeymoon. Whenever I take a vacation longer than a few days, I usually take the opportunity to rediscover books. I’m sad to say that I read far too few actual books in my normal life. This trip was a chance to do some real reading, and I try to balance the books I read with both some trashy crime or mystery novels and some cerebral non-fiction as well.

For this trip I had really been aching to finally read the acclaimed “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning title and a national bestselling book – and one I have heard quite a lot of buzz about. The back cover is filled with endorsements from such luminaries as Bill Gates, and Colin Renfrew of Nature Magazine. The book is basically about how and why the various cultures on Earth developed differently, with some acquiring technology and power, and others seemingly remaining stagnant in their development. The author tries to refute the racist assumption that some groups are inherently less intelligent because they never began using iron or developed writing of their own. He ties all this to positive-feedback loops involving geography, climate, the interplay between societies, and naturally the arrival of guns, germs, and steel.

Sounds fascinating, right? Sure it is. How can it not be? To top it all off, the author himself has had a rich and interesting life story having spent considerable time abroad living in New Guinea, with his life occasionally in peril (be it from malaria or hostile tribes), and he mixes anecdotes from his experiences into the narrative of the book.

The great thing about a book like this too is once you’ve read it, there are like thousands of people out there you can talk about it with – because the book was so popular. Because I was travelling in Panama at the time and bumping into other tourists, this turned out to be true. But something curious kept coming up in these conversations – nobody I met had actually finished the book – and this included several academics I ran into from the Smithsonian. Myself, when I got about 3/4 the way through my eyes began to droop and I stopped looking forward to the next page and chapter. I mean, seriously.. this is one boring book. Its not boring because the topic isn’t interesting, but the author really had an odd way of approaching the subject. The most striking flaw is the amount of repetition. He keeps going back to the same examples over and over to illustrate the application some new subtlety or theory – and after a while you just get really tired of hearing about it.

My point is that I found it interesting that while people were so eager to praise the book for it’s ideas, people were almost ashamed to admit they found it kindof boring and didn’t actually finish it. It certainly doesn’t necessarily follow that because the subject matter is weighty, the narrative is dry or unapproachable. I would contrast GGAS with other popular non-fiction books like Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which were both fascinating and very well written at the same time.

I wonder if Bill and Colin read the whole thing.