I've been reading Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain - essentially a travelogue from the 1720s. On the whole I've mostly enjoyed it. He does have an irritating habit of drivelling on about the country houses of the aristocracy, and describing churches in what I'd consider excessive detail, and he's inconsistent in his insistence on not dwelling on historical sites and events (at one point there's a very long - 19 pages - tangent about the siege of Colchester in 1648, but it was at least interesting, if irrelevant).
Finally though, I got to my snapping point with it this morning when, having waded through best part of 600 pages, we finally reach the North-East only for the scurvy fucker to blast through the whole of County Durham and Northumberland in just 11 pages, completely skipping over Sunderland in the process. To put this in a bit of context, he spends 9 pages talking about a proposed royal palace at Whitehall, including a detailed description of how it would be laid out and decorated, contrary to his own stated purpose of the book being a description of the country as it is, not possibly might be; there is also 10 pages about Beverly in Yorkshire, almost all of which is about the Church of St John. (This is one of two places - the other being relating to a church in Ripon - where he has reprinted and translated clearly fraudulent royal charters: they were both allegedly issued by King Athelstan, but clearly weren't written in 10th century English; to my inexpert eye they seemed more like 14th or maybe even 15th century.) He also spent 12 pages on yet another church at Southwell, Notts. He literally spent more pages describing a single church than he did on the entire North-East, from the Tees up to the Tweed. I'd been looking forward to hearing some account of what my hometown was like 300 years ago, patiently reading the earlier volumes detailing the South, only to get stiffed after some 570-odd pages. I should have known, never trust a Tory!