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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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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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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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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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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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I love Sulla's hat.
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Mar 13, 2024 16:07
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Onionetta posted:I am a big fan of C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series: the titular lawyer finds himself dragged into cases of murder, espionage and skulduggery that always end up involving contentious issues of politics and religion in the court of Henry VII. Great writing, great characters, and a great combination of my two favourite genres: historical fiction and murder mystery. There are an insane number of these set in the Roman empire. (I imagine there are some from every historical era.) So many, in fact, that I can't even remember which one I read. I don't like detective stories so I didn't get super far into it though. But if you like historical fiction and murder mysteries, you could read nothing but those for the rest of your life.
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Mar 27, 2024 18:29
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