World History

Which is a nice big juicy book, the interesting of the titles.
The Dr. Johnson book is not as big, and I may have been disappointed if I had started there.
Reading is easy and quite interesting, you can stop and start at your leisure.

Victorian England helped me grasp Dickens and Trollope and Austen a lot better.

The real fun is in the bibliography, lots of fascinating titles, of themselves. Many can be found at archive.org, as e-books or pdfs.

Hope you have fun with the books!