I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.
It's a very good historical book about history.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the chance to read as much as you like on a pet subject - so much that you could easily bore your friends senseless on the topic.
Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
The people who read the history books tend to have a natural zeal and are alarmingly well-read.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me.
I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.
I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.
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