One book I brought on vacation reads like a DBZ novelization (way too cool for me), and I found out the other book I brought was written by a terf (I pirated it, don’t worry).
Which time periods are you interested in?
Mary Renault’s good for ancient Greece.
Gore Vidal’s got some fun ones - Burr is the antidote for Hamilton. Julian is another solid one, on Julian the Apostate. You’ll wow everyone with your intimate knowledge of the Arian controversy.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, for 19th and 20th century East Africa.
J.G. Farrell has a trilogy examining the sins of the British Empire - The Siege of Krishnapur and Troubles are both excellent; I haven’t read The Singapore Grip yet. Along those lines - Thomas Flanagan’s’ The Year of the French.
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor - I think the former is underrated and the latter overrated, but they’re both very funny.
Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels, and A Place of Greater Safety for the French Revolution
Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet is amazing.
War and Peace counts, too.
Hilary Mantel
Lol, this is who i ditched. Sad news.
I’ll check out some of the others. The Farrell series sounds especially interesting.
I’d be interested in some chinese historical fiction, but I’ve read the classics. Maybe something more modern, but so many recommendations you see for that are anticommunist. So whatevs.
Oh, she was the terf? Damn.
For China - have you read Legend of the Condor Heroes? That ought to be a fun vacation read.
Ooo, no, i’ll check it out
Seconding Legend of Condor Heroes, Jin Yong was at the forefront of Wuxia lit and he writes action scenes and intricacies of martial arts styles interestingly, though one ding I have for him is that his character writing for women can be flat, but not creepy like how other writers can be. All of Jin Yong’s novels save for Sword Stained with Royal Blood [which is a shame because it’s got the coolest and most based title] can be found translated online in some form, a lot of them on libgen.li / libgen.is
Someone of historical importance was also a reader of Jin Yong serials:
