My favorite books of adventure, love, lust, and life’s lessons through time

I love the main character, the strongest woman in literature, who, in late Paleolithic times, literally invents the modern world. She is strong but thinks herself weak. She is beautiful but thinks herself ugly. She circumvents and overcomes every instance of adversity thrown her way. I want to be her, and the book permits me to wear her shoes.

I have been highly influenced by Jean Auel’s storytelling, especially the graphic scenes of Ayla’s loss of innocence, growth into sexuality, and descriptions of lust, love, and completion.

This book is not erotica, yet the love scenes are the best I’ve ever read and are a roadmap to create tension and heat in my writing. With her influence, my audience laughs, cries, and cheers their way through my books.

I am fascinated by the city of Rome, its history, republic, empire, and fall. I have been an amateur archaeologist, an assistant to the curator of the Metropolitan Museum, and a lecturer in the city of Rome.

This book, author, and series is the best recreation of classical times, historical figures, and visualization of history I’ve ever read. The detail is authentic and scholarly, and even obscure ancillary characters come to life.

Highly influential in historical fiction, McCullough transcends the fictional category in resurrecting characters long dead and places now in ruins. Although separated by two thousand years, those who populate these books feel utterly contemporary and understandable to twenty-first-century readers.

I have never been brought so close to a battle and a battlefield experience as when reading this book.

The horror, tension, excitement, valor, and regret of warfare are clearly depicted. The motivations for fighting for a terrible cause are examined. The determination to see things through to the bitter end is in evidence. It is a blueprint for writing warfare and helps the reader understand the excitement and tension in leading troops to the fear and futility of being on the line.

Best of all, Shaara has been able to bring life to Lee, who so often is referred to as a marble man. Here, he’s been humanized, and this alone makes our reading of history so much more personal and relevant.

This author is the master of alternative history. I love where he takes me. I enjoy his humanization of characters often seen as wooden or stone.

He examines the “what-ifs?” of the historical record. I find the twists and turns remarkable. Small events could so easily have altered major social, political, and cultural evolutions. Imagine a South victorious in our civil war. Imagine if there were no Lincoln assassination. Imagine Robert E. Lee as the newly elected President of the Confederacy with a platform of ending slavery.

As a historian, I am well aware that the smallest alterations in the fabric of time can have huge consequences. I love how Turtledove presents these possibilities to me.

This classic has been my guide to Victorian gentility, language, thought, and conversation.

Austen is a master of coming to terms with ill-gotten beliefs, false impressions, bad behavior, developing understanding, reversal of fortune, the plight of nineteenth-century women, and burgeoning affection. Austen writes of coming of age, loss of innocence, personal growth, burgeoning sexuality, and battling to be heard in a sea of voices.

Her characters are primarily strong modern women thrust into a world of the past where the patriarchy would slam them down. Elizabeth Bennet will not suffer the fools of her age without close examination, a rebellious counterpoint, and a confident challenge to the norms of her society.