Indeed. If you're in not into the particular history, boredom sets in rather quickly. I do not like overtly nationalist histories, for example. My strong dislike of nationalism/exceptionalism histories more or less eliminates all American history except for Zinn's A People's History. No wonder I live in Canada...
An odd truism to History: the key to writing good history is not necessarily the material and sources, but the style and structure of the text. Reading good, well-written history is fun and enjoyable; reading bad history, on the other hand, is nightmarish. So from what I can tell, the writing of history follows these steps: 1) following a style, 2) having a good structure, 3) the quality of the material and its organization, d) the clarity of the point of view or perspective (the actual 'history' part). In other words, the most important aspect to history is the least important to the discipline. No wonder every student in the social sciences finds writing History papers a chore!
