100 books like Jackdaws

There have been too many novels featuring the story of King Arthur to count; this is my favorite. I found it (and the following two books in the series) really captured the idea of who Arthur was, why he was needed, and why he did what he did at the time for me.

It was the first Cornwell novel I read, and he has become my favourite novellist. I think he writes battle scenes better than anyone–he puts you in the middle of the action and makes you feel the visceral nature of combat (especially in his Arthurian and medieval books). If anyone is looking for a place to start with Arthurian fiction but doesn’t know where to begin, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book and series. 

At the time of writing, this is believed to be the last in the Shardlake novels and I, for one, am already missing them. I have loved every one of the books in the series, following the adventures of the lawyer/crime solver Matthew Shardlake and his assistants Jack Barak and Nicholas Overton. The author has a real way of bringing the Tudor age to life and as a reader you are instantly transported into the 1500s with Sansom’s descriptive and quite brilliant writing. As a general recommendation I could have picked any of the Shardlake novels but under the heading of books that made me want to know more, the reason I have selected Tombland specifically as one of my top 5 books is the author’s focus on the peasants’ revolt in Norfolk in 1549.

The rebellion was led by a man named Robert Kett and although I had vaguely… show more.

A medieval world with dire wolves, dragons, and John Snow.

But seriously, Daenerys was a favourite of mine in that series. I have mentioned earlier that I love when the underdog wins – well I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but in my mind, that young woman who came from a place of being bullied by her crazy brother, pursued by a vengeful enemy on the iron throne, challenged by Dothraki, and judged by almost everyone else, grew in confidence, strength and courage to become a force to be reckoned with. She earned the title "Mother of Dragons."

There were several other strong females in this series: Arya, Sansa, Catelyn, Brienne, and Ygritte, to name a few. At times, the story is a bit gruesome and not for the faint-hearted – but definitely a good series to read.

While it is not as intellectually subtle or mature as Heinlein's later work, it has served as my blueprint for a life of self-reliance, discipline, and hard work. It is a stoicism-how-to book disguised as an entertaining yarn about killing bugs in space.

This book took the soft young man I was when I read it and made him hard. Then, Heinlein's later work made me balance that hardness with softness.

Reading Heinlein's entire body of work now allows me to observe the Tao revealing itself in the arc of a great man's life.

Spies, a mysterious death with what could be construed as a “ghostly” sighting, and an atmosphere that could be considered modern Gothic. This is the setup of Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

Under the backdrop of darkness and devastation which was still lingering in postwar Vienna, Greene shows it as a once beautiful city cast in a foggy pall, the cursed cloud of death hanging over it, which also happens to the characters in the story. The Third Man mixes the dread of Gothic and the unfolding suspense and paranoia involving the shadowy people in a shadowy world of espionage in a memorable, haunting fashion.

I loved this book because it’s about misfits. In this case, misfits who are spies. Spies who have screwed up and disgraced themselves and their masters at the British Secret Service. They’re led by the disheveled and malodorous Jackson Lamb, who is so smart he disdains everyone around him.

He and the Slow Horses get all the bad assignments, but I loved how each of them possessed special skills and a desire to redeem themselves. I think Mick Herron is the master of humorous spy fiction!  

Thanks to Hollywood adaptations and sometimes a greedy publisher, a great series can diminish as time passes. But that doesn’t change how cool the original was.

I love the setup of a man waking on a sailing vessel with no memory, only to discover his identity as super espionage agent. The mystery of the scenario and the intrigue as Bourne unravels his own personhood was so well done in this first book (and the first film was an excellent adaptation), and it is worth revisiting.

There are few who have written about occupied France as transportingly and with the same level of carefully dripped research as has Sebastian Faulks. Charlotte Gray is arguably the textbook from which all other authors might learn. It is impossible to sit inside a French farmhouse kitchen alongside one of his characters and not believe you are there, nor to be drawn into the world of Charlotte as she completes her SOE training and is dropped in France to fight for her country and to discover the fate of her lover, missing RAF pilot Peter Gregory. Spies, collaborators, constant jeopardy and a cracking love story too—unmissable.

“Je suis las,” is the first human utterance of A Hero of France. “I am tired of the way I have to live my life.” In the lights and shadows of Alan Furst’s Europe at war the challenges are almost elegant in their quiet persistence, and their demands for endurance through the endless nights of the European underground. Occupied France is often the transit point through the center of it all. Paris is the delicate city of hard dangers and the closed doors upon, or hidden stairways to, the French Resistance. Mathieu, without a surname, is the leader of one of its cells of ordinary men and women who love their country and its magnificent, brutalized city. Like my friend Alan Seeger, he becomes A Hero of France.

In the early days of World War II, a Paris-based film producer tries to carry on working as usual and ignore the Nazi occupiers. Given the chance to give some minor aid to the British secret service, he agrees, and with each step, he’s drawn deeper and deeper into danger. His best–and only—weapon is his wits. Maybe at first he doesn’t think he’s taking much of a risk. But, with hindsight, I know how precarious his situation is, and I’m silently begging him not to do it! Furst’s riveting spy tales are what first attracted me to stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations.