What Is Your Essential HF Reading List?

I don't know that I have a top 10 books, but one of my favorites is Phillipa Gregory. She never fails to entertain me, and her research seems really intense and detail-oriented.

My top list would probably be:

1. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
2. The Persian Boy, Mary Renault
3. The Game of Kings, Dorothy Dunnett
4. Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brien
5. Until the Sun Falls, Cecilia Holland
6. Burr, Gore Vidal
7. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
8. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
9. Sword at Sunset, Rosemary Sutcliff
10. Waverley, Sir Walter Scott

So we have a little overlap.

Hmmm, in no particular order here's ten I'd recommend any day:

1. The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar
2. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
3. The Flashman Series, George MacDonald Fraser
4. The War at the End of the World, Mario Vargas-Llosa
5. Master at Arms, Raphael Sabatini
6. Lord of Samarkand, Robert E Howard
7. The Light in the Forest, Conrad Richter
8. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
9. Siege of Krishnapur, JG Farrell
10. All Quiet on the Western Front, Eric Maria Remark

That's not a definitive list, but it will do.

I would recommend a list that showed some very different but equally entertaining ways of combining fiction and history. I know I'm going to wake up tonight going "nooo! I forgot the best one!" but here goes an attempt at such a list (in no particular order):

1. Child of the Morning, by Pauline Gedge
2. An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Ian Pears
3. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
4. Katherine, by Anya Seton
5. Shining Through, by Susan Isaacs
6. City of My Dreams, by Per Anders Fogelström
7. War and Peace, by Tolstoy
8. Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters
9. The Game of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett
10. Drottning Grågyllen, by Moa Martinsson (sorry, it doesn't seem to be available in English, although the other books in the same series are) ETA: if I had to name one more in English instead, it'd probably be Greenmantle, by Buchan

benbenberi said:

Until the Sun Falls, Cecilia Holland

Click to expand...

I don't really have a top ten list because I am weird, but I have to agree with this. I've been steadily reading through Cecelia Holland's books. I just finished this last night. I don't know if it's my favorite of hers, but I thought it was really remarkable.

In no particular order by author:

1. Sabatini
2. Costain
3. Shellabarger
4. Dunnett
5. Renault
6. Graves
7. Early Yerby
8. Winston Churchill (not the Brit PM)
9. Edison Marshall
10 Sinkiewicz

WildScribe said:

I don't know that I have a top 10 books, but one of my favorites is Phillipa Gregory. She never fails to entertain me, and her research seems really intense and detail-oriented.

Click to expand...

Absolutely Philippa Gregory especially the Constant Princess.

The Sin Killer series by Larry McMurtry.

Here's my list (mostly research for 14th Century England):

Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer
Medieval Lives, by Terry Jones
The Time Travelers' Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer
Daily Life in Chaucer' England, by Jeffery L. Singman and Will McLean
A Distant Mirror, by Barbara W. Tuchman
Medieval Scotland, by Peter Yeoman
The Gough Map, by Nick Millea
Fourteenth-Century Towns, by John D. Clare, Editor
1381 An English Knight's Household in the Fourteenth Century, by The Peel Affinity

And I could go on. I also read fiction from the same period.

1. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
2. The Iron Trail, Rex Beach
3. The Beacon at Alexandria, Gillian Bradshaw
4. The Country Beyond, James Oliver Curwood
5. Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini
6. The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas
7. The Virginian, Owen Wister
8. Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz
9. The Flames of Rome, Paul Maier
10.To Have and to Hold, Mary Johnston

Has anybody ever read--remember?--this last one? It was epic swashbuckle, and it took me years to find my own copy. If you like Sabatini, you'd probably like it.

Edit: I see it's on Amazon now; mine is one of the early (really old unrevised) copies. And probably the better for it.

11. I don't care if it was/is YA, Fighting Prince of Donegal still makes the list.

gothicangel said:

[/LIST]
Did she also write The Memoirs of Hadrian? [It's on my To Read List.]

Click to expand...

She certainly did. The Abyss was the first thing of hers I read, so Yourcenar's take on the 16th century has a way of mixing with Robert E Howard's Red Sonja at the Siege of Vienna in 1529, to define my approach to the era.

Scaramouche! War and Peace! I, Claudius! Yep, I need to put them all on my list too.

(If we count in hexadecimal, 10 gets to be a lot bigger...)