Just finished Kite runner and it’s unlike anything else I’ve read in many ways. I really loved the opportunity to learn some history and the way it encouraged me to learn more outside of the book. Obviously the story is incredible and the characters are, to me, unforgettable. I’m just now easing back into regularly reading and I’m very easily distracted so I’m looking for more books in this historical fiction genre that are relatively easy to read in that they have a good pace to the story and I won’t want to put it down. Doesn’t necessarily have to be the same vibe as kite runner in how heavy it is. I dooo have to add that I’m planning on reading a thousand splendid suns for sure.
by Secure-City7148
3 Comments
I loved the Kite Runner. Historical fiction is my favorite. One of my all time favorite books is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It is not historical fiction… it is nonfiction… but I thought I’d drop it here for you. Below I pasted a description of the book. Easy to read.
In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
It sounds like youd like something told from a first person perspective, that gives a lot of cultural detail. Im not including Generational dramas like Pachinko (which is awesome) or historical fiction that uses multiple POV. Or anything about connecting with past ancestors, like Foer or a lot of WWII lit. And no growing up in America stories, except for that first one 😉
Middle Eastern: Everything Sad is Untrue,
Asia: Tastes Like War, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous(very sad!), authors Amy Tan, Lisa See and Gail Tsukiyama
Wartime: the Pull of the Stars, Author Ken Follett
Europe: Island of Missing Trees, Small Things Like These(novella), Author Petra Durst-Benning
Americas: Bless Me, Ultima,, Like Water for Chocolate, Blue Skin of the Sea
Africa: How Beautiful we Were
I like Silvia Moreno Garcia if you want to go more fanciful. Jade and Shadow does some Mayan history, Silver Nitrate film history…
Classics like Steinbeck, Tolstoy or Jack London can be great too. Barbara Kingsolver writes to a bunch of different locales Beautifully, but I can’t speak to how well she researches.
“The Mountains sing” – amazing book about three generations going through the Vietnam war. When I read it, I felt it was similar to Khaled Hosseini’s books.
Do read and let me know your thoughts on it.
Also, I think “Wild Swans” by Jung Chang is also similar book. But I haven’t read it yet.