100 Books Like The Guns of the South

This one isn’t fantasy at all. In fact, it’s probably the most accurate fictional retelling of the battle of Gettysburg out there. But I love it so much I had to list it here.

Furthermore, the characters involved—such as Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain—are deeply spiritual men, meaning that many pages meditate on the meaning of all this blood and loss. These meditations evoke a sense fantasy often can: that the visible world contains a mystery deeper than our limited minds can grasp. 

Yet the text remains deeply human. The Civil War pits brother against brother, friend against friend. In it, there is a great speech by Col. Chamberlain addressing his men which captures a theme of the book.

“This is a different kind of army,” he says. “If you look back through history you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight… show more.

Just like the Falco mysteries showed me that you could have fun with your historical detectives, this book showed me that there’s more drama in Ancient Roman history than in any daytime soap opera, and this novelisation of Marius and Sulla packs a lot more of an emotional punch than any textbook ever could. 

I don’t know enough about Marius and Sulla to say how much poetic license the author took, but this really does read as a seamless and in-depth exploration of the bloody power struggles between two very different but equally ambitious men in the time of the Roman Republic.   

The whole series is fantastic!

This is the best novel I’ve read about bubonic plague.

Student historian Kivrin travels back in time to England of the Middle Ages—unknowingly at the start of the Black Death. The cause of Black Death was the plague bacteria, unknown to people of that time.

What makes the book memorable is its depiction of everyday life, where children who get lost in the forest must find their way home by the tolling of the village church bell. Ultimately, the bell tolls for all the plague’s victims.

The vivid characterization makes me experience people of a time so distant their minds feel alien to us, yet still deeply human.

Jane Austin is a classical writer of romance and a perfect combination of well-written English. The love Mr Darcy had for Elizabeth was explained with passion through the English language. 

It addressed issues within that time, and the beauty of a girl, as well as the strength of a man, was portrayed well. Jane Austin has other books, but my favorite was this one. 

I have enjoyed literally hundreds of hours of thrilling military SF in the series of which this book is the first novel. David Weber is one of two authors who have invented new SF sub-genres. In David’s case, the sub-genre is often called space opera. The other author is David Drake. His Hammer’s Slammers stories are now considered the first books in the ‘space marines’ sub-genre.

David Weber’s story universe is huge. I sometimes think it’s too big in the sense that he tries to weave too many sub-plots into the larger story arc. But his first book is quite moderate in this regard. I started writing my own military SF novels partly because Weber wasn’t writing new sequels fast enough to satisfy my thirst for thrilling space combat.

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.

This is the first in a long-running, action-packed science fiction series starring Miles Vorkosigan. He is brilliant, driven, ambitious, hyperactive, and neurotic. He also suffers from a chronic disability that makes him unfit for military service on his home planet. This is why he takes to the stars for a life of adventure and excitement under the pseudonym Miles Naismith, Admiral of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries.

This book is our introduction to Miles and shows the birth of the Naismith persona, and it is fabulous fun on every page. I devoured this series like potato chips.

I’m going old-school, back to one of the grandfathers of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.

Not only is his book a masterful example of character-driven storytelling, but it takes a critical eye to many of the things our current society takes for granted as being “true” and “right,” finding them wanting. It’s also been a huge influence on me in my writing, as have many of Heinlein’s other works, and I couldn’t not put it in here.

I thought I knew my United States history, but I did not know the siege of Vicksburg, one of the most horrifying and significant military actions of the Civil War.

This book opened my eyes to the intense pain of the engagement through the stories of soldiers and civilians, men and women. The author does a masterful job of humanizing an account that could easily become a textbook story of a military engagement. He left me understanding the scar this siege left on Vicksburg for 100 years.

What I loved most about this book was the voice. Woodrell did a fantastic job presenting the period Biblical lyricism through the narrator, Jake Roedel, a reluctant Confederate soldier.

The scene is the largely overlooked Kansas-Missouri front of the US Civil War, where bloody vendettas were just as much of the fighting as were skirmishes between the blue and the gray. We ride with the young men, boys really, as they raid and pillage, hide and survive, and there’s nothing romantic about the loss and pointless savagery.