How are you with other classic stories? Do you like Three Musketeers? Treasure Island? Count of Monte Cristo? The Once and Future King? War of the worlds?

Movies and then television influenced the pace of novels.

But I love Lord of the rings. It is a subtle sophisticated book. And if your characters are going to hike across the world, there should be scenes of walking.

Buying books and reading books are separate hobbies.

Re wasting money, you should budget for some fun expenditures if you can afford it.

TLDR, two secret agents, working for opposing sides, are time traveling and attempting to shape history to their specific, contrasting purposes. I liked it, but I plan to read it again because I missed a lot that I would understand better after having read the story. The perspective is based on these two individuals and they themselves don’t know much about the broader context.

This author expects you to pick up from context clues within the letters, where you are in history, and what the agent is trying to do to either promote or interfere with technological development in a timeline. It honestly would help a lot if the editor had added footnotes with wikipedia links related to the history of technology.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a new one. It only has a few parts that are directly war, but I believe it is a great book. It starts with the fall of Saigon.

Gene Wolfe. I love the Wizard Knight. It’s mysterious and moody but not difficult to read.

Historical fiction is often evaluated as more or less historically accurate, but sometimes the most accurate is a worse story.

I don’t know for sure, but I thought the Johnny Fontane chapters were referring to Frank Sinatra. I’m sure someone has written about the releationship of the Godfather novel to the real life mob in Vegas and elsewhere.

I first read the book at the age of 12 and yeah, Sonny and Lucy at the wedding was a bit much for young me.