The next book on my 'stuff people recommended' list is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. It is a book about archaeology / anthropology that looks at ancient peoples, particularly a group that lived in the steppes of Asia called Indo-Europeans.
It is the first book that I failed to finish.
I didn't fail because the book was bad, or wrong, but rather because it is so chock fill of minute details that I just don't care about. It sounds like it would be right up my alley - I am interested in historic trends and the idea of following the invention of the wheel or horseback riding and seeing how they influenced language migration sounds neat.
Unfortunately the book is just so dry and so full of proof for minor points that I couldn't get through it all. I read halfway, and then stopped reading at all for weeks because I had no desire at all to finish. Finally I concluded that I need to give up on my goal of reading all the books all the way through and simply write up what I have and ship it back to the library.
It turns out that I like broad strokes of learning when I am looking at something quite unfamiliar. I suspect I am like most people in this regard. If I am well versed in a topic I enjoy intricate detail, but for something I know little about I can't get that interested in a scholarly treatise that gets bogged down in minute tidbits. I just don't care about the origin of a particular consonant in the Proto Indo European language.
The book seems well researched. I don't fault its academic credentials, though honestly I don't know that I would be able to tell if it was absolutely full of it. That might be the issue, really. If every single word in the book was a lie I don't think I would be able to definitely argue against it, and that means I am reading way above my pay grade.
If you enjoy detailed linguistic explanations and exhaustive examination of archeological evidence, this book may be for you.
For me though, it was just a bit too much. I don't have the knowledge required to get a lot out of it... and I suspect that 99.9% of humanity is in the same situation.
My next couple of books are much more approachable, written for mass audiences, and I am sure I will be able to finish them. For now though I will consider myself defeated by detail.
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