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What is Historical Fiction? Historical Fiction is a term for fictional stories taking place in real historical events. They could be about famous people or about the time period itself. Some subgenres include Alternate History and Historical Fantasy. Notable authors include Philippa Gregory, Ken Follet, and Patrick O'Brian. Okay, but why do you like it? I love to write and have a Bachelor's degree in History. Historical fiction is a great way to combine my two loves. While I like reading history books for fun, sometimes they can be a little too dry. Plus I love seeing authors weave storytelling into real-world events. Sure, they may be a bit inaccurate but so are most historical fiction movies. That's why I made this thread so I could rant and rave about this genre and get recommendations from fellow goons. So what are you reading/read? I finished reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O' Farrell. An interesting look into how a 16 year old girl got swept into a forced marriage by a seemingly charming Duke. However, a lot of the prose streched on for far too long. Also despite being intelligent and "not like other girls", we never see her do much in regards to that. Perhaps it was the result of living in 1550's Italy as well. That time period was none too kind to women. I'm going to add a Content Warning for a marital rape scene that goes on a bit too uncomfortably long as well. But it's based on Robert Browning's poem "The Last Duchess" so if you like that sort of dark historical fiction, you'll like this book.
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Jan 30, 2024 21:39
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I am about to finish I, Claudius by Robert Graves which is based on the life on the Roman emperor Claudius. I am not enjoying it (except for a single part where his grandmother made fun of him and his gigantic bride, that was hilarious) and forcing myself to complete it otherwise it would nag me. It's like a YA novel and all the characters are plain, e.g., "this man was really mean, this woman was really nice" and so on. I would have loved it as a teenager, though.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:05
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I’ve found that it’s a bit spotty whether nineteenth century classics set decades in the author’s past are referred to as historical fiction. I guess for more pastoral settings, time period can be almost arbitrary apart from the absence of mentions of the railroad.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:53
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Gleisdreieck posted:I am about to finish I, Claudius by Robert Graves which is based on the life on the Roman emperor Claudius. I am not enjoying it (except for a single part where his grandmother made fun of him and his gigantic bride, that was hilarious) and forcing myself to complete it otherwise it would nag me. It's like a YA novel and all the characters are plain, e.g., "this man was really mean, this woman was really nice" and so on. I would have loved it as a teenager, though. maybe try Julian by Gore Vidal, fwiw i liked the robert graves stuff but he really only tells the story, rather than fleshing out the characters too far past the historical descriptions.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:24
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I, Claudius owns I have Sarum on my to read list for the year
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Jan 31, 2024 04:35
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The Wolf Hall trilogy from Hilary Mantel does a good job of this genere. I liked it more than when I tried to read Pillars of the Earth. Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is also good, but it is playing way faster and loser with history than some others.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:46
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Getting started on Patrick O’Brian is part of my new year’s resolution. Gravity’s Rainbow, too, is historical, though I don’t tend to see people apply the term to Pynchon.
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Jan 31, 2024 05:44
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Eco's The Name Of The Rose rules, it's a murder mystery set in a 14th-century abbey that's full of a cast of petty dipshit shut-ins who love nothing more than to gossip. Sure, it's also a beautiful exploration of language, religion, and the ways in which knowledge is bound by both. But it's mostly about the messy bitches of medieval Catholicism.
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Jan 31, 2024 07:31
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Gleisdreieck posted:I am about to finish I, Claudius by Robert Graves which is based on the life on the Roman emperor Claudius. I am not enjoying it (except for a single part where his grandmother made fun of him and his gigantic bride, that was hilarious) and forcing myself to complete it otherwise it would nag me. It's like a YA novel and all the characters are plain, e.g., "this man was really mean, this woman was really nice" and so on. I would have loved it as a teenager, though. Augustus by John Williams is better. It's basically a bunch of people writing letters and diaries about what the gently caress is up with Augustus.
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Jan 31, 2024 07:36
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I read Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book last year, and man that really stuck with me. It starts off as a time travel book, but since the woman lands in the Middle Ages right in the Black Death, it turns into an apocalyptic story. The back half of the book is just desperation. It’s beautiful. I’ll never read it again.
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Jan 31, 2024 20:14
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There's always Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond books, I've only read the first couple but keep meaning to try to get through the rest one of these years.
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Feb 1, 2024 00:53
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Bernard Cromwell was the author that first introduced me to historical fiction, especially his Sharpe series. I fell in love with the TV series set during the Napoleonic wars and found the handful of books I've read about his rifleman even better. Cromwell does a great job intertwining the historical battles with his hero protagonist. Some might say they're simpler reads with a more formatted approach at times but I've found myself excited to turn the page and find out what happens. One day I plan to read the more Navy orientated books done by C.S Forester and Patrick O'Brian. So many fun books out there.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:30
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https://bsky.app/profile/planetoffinks.bsky.social/post/3km4utp63yr26
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Feb 24, 2024 16:13
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Col.Schultz posted:The Wolf Hall trilogy from Hilary Mantel does a good job of this genere. I liked it more than when I tried to read Pillars of the Earth. Wolf Hall is indeed great. I also liked A Place of Greater Safety by Mantel.
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Feb 25, 2024 10:20
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That last book of the trilogy had the worst case of 'Author is now to big and famous to be edited properly' i've seen in years though. It's OK, but at least a third of The MIrror and the LIght should have been cut, that book is bloated.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:15
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should I read Clavell's Asian Saga in publication or chronological order? publication: King Rat Taipan Shogun Noble House Whirlwind Gaijin chronological: Shogun Taipan Gaijin King Rat Noble House Whirlwind
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Feb 29, 2024 02:10
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I will never stop reading Colleen McCullough’s mammoth First Man In Rome series. By the time I’m done it’s been long enough since the first one that I’m due for another reread.
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Feb 29, 2024 16:30
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Fate Accomplice posted:should I read Clavell's Asian Saga in publication or chronological order? It doesn't really matter. Some mild plot details that are probably on the back of the book anyway but just in case: The connecting thread (in four of them) is the Struan syndicate, which is created - alongside Hong Kong - in Taipan. Shogun doesn't connect with any of the other books except its direct sequel Gai-jin. Gai-jin is where Struan stuff intersects with the Japanese stories. Noble House is a business thriller set in 1960s HK and is probably the book that is focused most on Struan, and Whirlwind is set during the Iranian revolution and involves a Struan subsidiary trying to extricate a bunch of helicopters from Iran. Really the only thing you have to do is read Shogun before Gaijin, so your chronological order is fine. King Rat is a semi-autobiographical account of Clavell's internment in a Japanese POW camp and isn't connected to the rest of the books at all, you can read it at any point. Also this connecting thread is really loose, many of these books take place centuries apart so you might see a character from another book referenced, but the continuity isn't very tight. Also, the books are all very different from each other, if you love Shogun and Gaijin, you might not necessarily enjoy Noble House or Whirlwind, which are set in the relatively recent past. I liked them all (20 years ago when I read them in college) but I was also aware of the difference in settings. zoux fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 17:56
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parara posted:I will never stop reading Colleen McCullough’s mammoth First Man In Rome series. By the time I’m done it’s been long enough since the first one that I’m due for another reread. Is the series good?
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Feb 29, 2024 18:00
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Can vouch for An Officer and a Spy and the Cicero Trilogy by Robert Harris. Very convincing portrayals of turn-of-the-century Third French Republic and late Roman Republic, right there. (No idea personally whether they're accurately portrayed, but they feel authentic, which is the key thing.) Obligatory shoutout to George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman Papers as well, for which the dedicated thread's been regrettably dormant.
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Feb 29, 2024 21:24
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StrixNebulosa posted:Is the series good? It's slow and dense but it's probably the gold standard as far as Roman historical fiction goes. First Man covers the era in which Marius and Sulla were ascendant, which is woefully underrecognized in history because it happened right before the whole Julius Caesar thing. But McCullough also wants you to get a picture of how Romans of all classes lived, so you'll be following these patrician families in compelling political intrigue and then it switches to like 200 pages on what it's like to live in an insula. It's a bit drier than I like.
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Feb 29, 2024 21:33
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parara posted:I will never stop reading Colleen McCullough’s mammoth First Man In Rome series. By the time I’m done it’s been long enough since the first one that I’m due for another reread. That's what should be next on my list after I finish The Bloodstained Tea Cosy
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Feb 29, 2024 22:14
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StrixNebulosa posted:Is the series good? zoux up there is spot-on. This is my favourite book series of all time but you really need to be a Rome turbo nerd or willing to be immersed to your chin in what McCullough is describing, usually at length. Probably both of those. I get completely lost in these books every time, in the good way.
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Mar 1, 2024 03:32
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I'm due a second listen to the History of Rome podcast, so heck! First Man in Rome ordered, I will give this series a shot!
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Mar 1, 2024 05:10
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I'm gonna do a post on the grandaddy of historical fiction, Bernard Cornwell. I love Cornwell, I've read tons of his books, and he is eminently readable and tries to set characters in the worlds in which they live. No other HF author, in my opinion, is able to create a sense of setting, history, and texture of the place and people he is writing about, while maintaining a good pace and story. He is most famous for his series of novels about Richard Sharpe, and man who rises from private to officer in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. This was also turned into a massively popular BBC TV movie series, starring Sean Bean in his first major role. I've only read a couple of these, because 19th c. warfare isn't really my bag, I'm more of a medievalist. The Warlord Chronicles - Probably his second most famous series, this is a trilogy that imagines what a historically accurate Arthurian legend would look like. Normally when we see stuff about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, they are dressed in full plate armor astride fully caprisioned destriers galloping about from this castle to the next. That's massively ahistorical however, and there's really only a very small window of time in which there could've been a King Arthur lost to history: subroman Britain. He plays with the stories here, and if you know anything about how the various arthurian legends developed over time, especially once the French court got a hold of them in the 12thc., it will add a richness to the books as some of the changes to the characters reflect changes in the legend. In this telling, Britain is a ghostly land, its people splintered, its religion destroyed by the Romans. The remaining Britons are now under siege from the Saxons, who bring violence but, even worse, Christianity. So while our Arthur is the epitome of a Christian king, Cornwall's Arthur is a pagan. The story is told through the eyes of Derfel (that is to say St. Derfel) who is now a retired old monk. The series is great, it gets into the tension around the expansion of Christianity, the beliefs and practices of the pagan peoples of Britain, and the legacy of Roman Britain. He;s not trying to claim this is what must've happened, just if there was a King Arthur, this is the only perioid in which he could've lived and how that might differ from our popular perception of Arthur due to the cultures, politics, and technology of the time. Unlike the Sharpe series of the Saxon Stories series, this one is a self-contained story, and it's where I'd recommend someone starts with Cornwell. The Saxon Stories - This is the one the excellent Netflix series The Last Kingdom is based on. We follow Uhtred of Bebbanburg, an earl's son who is captured and raised by norsemen during the Danish conquest of Britain. The framing is almost identical to the Warlord Chronicles, we are told this story from the perspective of Uhtred as an old man, writing about his adventures, triumphs, and failures. He becomes the close confidant of Alfred the Great, and aids him in his efforts to defeat the rampaging Danes and secure the kingdom of Wessex (though he has dreams of uniting all the realm under one English King). This one is a bit more sprawling, there are 13 novels in this one, and he gets away from the central conflict quite a bit as Uhtred goes off on his own in some books. I've only read the first five or six of these, but the first three are solid as hell. The Grail Quest - A tetralogy that beings with Harlequin (or the Archer's Tale if you're in America) following a yeoman archer as he participates in some of the most important battles of the early parts of the 100 Years War. I don't want to get into the grail stuff much because that would spoil quite a bit, but the historical hooks for these are a look at how the English longbowman operated on the battlefields of France.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:29
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zoux posted:I'm gonna do a post on the grandaddy of historical fiction, Bernard Cornwell. I love Cornwell, I've read tons of his books, and he is eminently readable and tries to set characters in the worlds in which they live. No other HF author, in my opinion, is able to create a sense of setting, history, and texture of the place and people he is writing about, while maintaining a good pace and story. He is most famous for his series of novels about Richard Sharpe, and man who rises from private to officer in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. This was also turned into a massively popular BBC TV movie series, starring Sean Bean in his first major role. I've only read a couple of these, because 19th c. warfare isn't really my bag, I'm more of a medievalist. ugh, all of these sound fantastic and I can't decide which one to buy first. Have you read David Drake's The Dragon Lord? It's more fantasy, but it's also my favorite take on King Arthur - not as a king, but as a man living in a world abandoned by the Romans.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:34
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StrixNebulosa posted:ugh, all of these sound fantastic and I can't decide which one to buy first. No, but I will, I love subroman Britain. And Roman Britain too, but post-Roman Britain really is a true dark age, it's almost post apocalyptic. Again, I'd recommend the Warlord Chronicles, just because it's a tightish trilogy and you are, I assume like most people, at least somewhat familiar with the major characters and events. One thing the Cornwell books get across is how much of a void was left by the Romans sudden departure, and how they have this almost mythical status among the remaining population. People living in decaying ruins, in buildings that no one knows how to build anymore. The fall of the western Roman empire is often said to be a slow decline and fade out, with many of the former "barbarians" being fully romanized culturally and technologically and so it wasn't as dramatic as we think it is. But it really was like that in Britain. One of the most fun aspects of the series, I think, is the complete reversal of the religious aspects of the familiar story, with Merlin as the driving force against the spread of Christianity. He also does a great job of explaining why people might believe in the supernatural and magic without making them stupider than us. Merlin and Nimue are really good characters in this story. e: oh yeah reading the wiki summary of The Dragon Lord, you'll find it very familiar. zoux fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 17:49
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There's a TV adaptation of the first Warlord Chronicles book Winter King as well now, came out before Xmas.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:23
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zoux posted:No, but I will, I love subroman Britain. And Roman Britain too, but post-Roman Britain really is a true dark age, it's almost post apocalyptic. This sounds really interesting, thanks for the recommendation! Definitely picking this up.
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Mar 2, 2024 01:22
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Declare, by Tim Powers. A cold war spy story with supernatural elements loosely based on the life of real life spy Kim Philby.
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Mar 2, 2024 02:35
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Asides from questions of factual veracity, is Haley’s Roots a good read?
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Mar 2, 2024 03:14
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Traxis posted:Declare, by Tim Powers. A cold war spy story with supernatural elements loosely based on the life of real life spy Kim Philby. This one is an absolute banger. If Le Carre wrote a Lovecraft story.
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Mar 2, 2024 19:35
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Traxis posted:Declare, by Tim Powers. A cold war spy story with supernatural elements loosely based on the life of real life spy Kim Philby. yep read this, it is a great book.
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Mar 3, 2024 22:04
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FPyat posted:Asides from questions of factual veracity, is Haley’s Roots a good read? Yes,
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Mar 4, 2024 06:04
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I wasn't expecting First Man in Rome to have such delightful prose? My eyes have been dragged across these dense pages as the lurid world draws me in. Sulla's party! The bulls! The sense that the author adores these people, as farce and as legend, and you can practically feel her smiling as she writes.
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Mar 9, 2024 03:05
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Has anyone read Quo Vadis by Sienkiewicz? I remember hearing good things about it, but am unsure if it was something that actually happened or if my brain is just giving up the ghost.
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Mar 11, 2024 13:49
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Samovar posted:Has anyone read Quo Vadis by Sienkiewicz? I remember hearing good things about it, but am unsure if it was something that actually happened or if my brain is just giving up the ghost. It's all very bombastic and tragic and has good character work (apart from a couple of absolute caricatures) that's still easy to relate to. If you're looking for a fun read you'll get that out of it. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Mar 12, 2024 |
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Mar 12, 2024 00:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:I wasn't expecting First Man in Rome to have such delightful prose? My eyes have been dragged across these dense pages as the lurid world draws me in. Sulla's party! The bulls! The sense that the author adores these people, as farce and as legend, and you can practically feel her smiling as she writes. I'm glad you're enjoying it so far! Sulla is a delight and I looked forward to every chapter about him. Everything turns so flamboyant and unhinged whenever we're in his head.
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Mar 13, 2024 08:05
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I love Sulla's hat.
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Mar 13, 2024 16:07
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Don't let him hear you!!
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Mar 13, 2024 18:43
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