If you follow me on Instagram (@hppress), you'll know that I've read a lot in the last year. Last few years, really. Okay, I've always read a lot. But the last year has brought me some really excellent reads. So if you're all caught up with my releases (hello, shameless plug), and need a fat book to curl up with on a foggy, dreary Friday in February, might I make the following suggestions:
The Way of Kings. This past summer was, perhaps embarrassingly, my first foray into reading Brandon Sanderson. I started with the Mistborn trilogy, since, while kneeling on the floor at Barnes & Noble, weighing a book in each hand, Mistborn was substantially lighter than TWOK. I chickened out and went with the smaller book. I really enjoyed that trilogy, loved it, even, but The Way of Kings I loved. This series is old-fashioned, great big high fantasy, replete with its own world, countries, cultures, religions, and rules. If you're used to fantasy, the heaviness of getting into the first book won't be an obstacle, and you'll love the characters. I'm still slowly working my way through book three, Oathbringer, dragging it out a bit since I don't know when the next volume will release - and since I have about a dozen things I'm reading to boot.
At the front of the novel, Sanderson says that this series is his great passion project, that it was ten years in the making, and you can tell. His care for that world and the characters shines through the text. When an author really loves something, it's usually an indication that it's pretty special.
His Majesty's Dragon. I started Naomi Novik's Temeraire series just before Christmas and I think it's absolutely delightful. I have her Uprooted and Spinning Silver on my TBR, but I started with her dragons, and I'm glad I did. Central protagonist Captain Will Laurence is outwardly dry, buttoned-up, and...I won't say rude. But there's a touch of the dismissive, at moments. But you can read right through that to the big heart beneath, and he loves his dragon - the titular Temeraire. Novik's dragons are not unpredictable brutes like Dany's Drogon, but can speak, and read, and even write, after a fashion - at least Temeraire can. He's completely earnest, and lovable, and I know I mentioned on Insta how nostalgic this series makes me for the animated Flight of Dragons I loved as a kid. Novik's writing also has a particular cleverness that has always attracted me to a certain kind of fiction; the sense that the author knows just what to tell you - and what not to. Like you're in very capable, knowledgeable hands while reading. This series is a treat.
The Confessions of Young Nero. I picked this one up precisely because, in it, Margaret George has done exactly what I'm doing with Vlad Tepes: taking the reader inside the head and heart of a historical figure largely remembered as a monster. (Get ready for a very long-winded post or two from me about this). George introduces us to Nero as a child, and walks us through his strange and threatening adolescence, highlighting the machinations of a mother you wouldn't wish upon anyone. The book is in no way an excuse for Nero's rule, but rather an attempt to understand it, and George's prose is wonderful.
The Race to Save the Romanovs. This last book is one that I actually haven't started yet. So I can't yet make a true recommendation. I picked it up months ago, intending to read it before I started work on Golden Eagle - not wanting to further muddy my head with Romanovs while I was writing of Draculas. Now that Dragon Slayer is finished, and I'm barreling right into GE, I think I'll give it a go. I've got to get back into that Alexei headspace.
In general, I try to keep at least one research book and one for-fun book going at all times, and usually end up juggling six or seven. Writing Sons of Rome, given its breadth of history, has been the most daunting, but exhilarating research project of my life. I feel like I'm back in school, only this time I'm studying the periods and the people that interest me most. History is fascinating, man. Just...fascinating.
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