library books to read during long medical procedures

(liable to be the first in a series)

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (Norton, 2011)
A deconstruction of everything I learned at school about the mighty 19C transcontinental railroad system. First, as I knew well, they weren't transcontinental: they only ran west from places like Omaha and St. Louis. But though the existing system covered everywhere east of there, it wasn't continuous: different gauges, breaks between lines, made everything slow. The transcontinentals were supposed to pay for themselves with freight, but freight trains were irregular and ad hoc, and it was still cheaper to send goods by ship via Panama, even though there wasn't a canal there yet, so financing was precarious. The mighty financiers like C.P. Huntington spent their time bailing themselves out of disaster, and they knew nothing about running a railroad. Meanwhile the people who did run the railroad didn't know what they were doing either, and setting freight rates, which had such a big effect on development of the country, was a guesswork procedure. The main lesson of this long and overdetailed book is that everybody was incompetent, including senators: "In making a case for political compromise, one should avoid John Sherman. If Henry Clay was the Great Compromiser, John Sherman was the Not So Great Compromiser."

Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (Knopf, 2018)
Trump? Yes, I picked up this book because I'd seen that in 2016 Amis reviewed Trump's latest book and compared it with the 30-year-old Art of the Deal, concluding even then "that in the last thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline." (But wait: did he write his own books? "We can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature's reluctant micromanagers.")
Other than that, to appreciate this book you have to be really interested in Bellow and Nabokov, and I'm not. (There's not much about Hitchens or Travolta, or Trump.)