Bought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I like the way he writes; he's funny, and likes to exaggerate or use analogies to get his point across. I think I think the way he does. Here's the first quote (a very long one) that I like, and it was in the introduction, so be forewarned about future quotes.
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.
That's something to remember when you think you're supremely unlucky.
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