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.
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:
Show
Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series is good if you're interested in Napoleonic-era British naval warfare.
James Elroy's L.A. Quartet is a great series of crime novels, set in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s. His Underworld USA trilogy takes place in the late 50s through to the early 70s, and covers the significant events of that time.
I listened to the audiobook of the first book of the LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia. For me it was the perfect book, exactly to my tastes. Just absolutely fucked. A violent psychosexual odyssey through the sleaze of post-war LA. There's not a single decent person anywhere to be seen.
Also the audiobook is very good. It's the sort of one where the reader is more voice actor than just narrator, really making a performance of it.
Haven't picked up the other books because my library only has books 1 & 3. I'll just buy them at some point.
I enjoyed "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck. It takes place at the dawn of the industrial revolution in Qing Dynasty China.
There's a short story - I'll Seen in Tyre - that's part of the Roma Sub Rosa (ancient Roman murder series), which I really liked, as well.
golden kamuy is a manga but it's incredible. in early 20th century hokkaido 24 convicts escape a max security prison, each with part of a map to a massive amount of gold tattooed on them
