In the past six weeks, I’ve blown through more than 20 of the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell (holding off on the 1820-set one to use as incentive to meet my page goals this month).
Wow. Rollicking adventure, tight serial plotting and continuing characters who grow (somewhat). I read them in historical order, marveling that he has published them out of that order. The earliest ones, set in India in at the turn of the nineteenth century, were published nearly two decades after the ones during the Napoleonic war. Those feel richer in character, but all the books are amazing for plot and historical detail. It reads like he had the whole of Sharpe’s life plotted, down to month and day, before he published the first story. Events and characters weave in and out, here as backstory, there as main plot, with only a few slips (although I bet the folks at the Sharpe Appreciation Society has found a few more).
This first time I read mainly for enjoyment, though it feels weird to “enjoy” scenes of carnage and loss. But man are are they well-described and ripping adventurous. Now I’ll tease apart a few of the faster-feeling scenes (actually, that could be nearly any of them) to see what I can try to put in my stories. Learning to better control pacing and building stronger plots are two of my three writing goals this year. Cornwell’s Sharpes are a master class in both.
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