Hi! To expand on the title, I'm a voracious reader, but mainly in fiction. I really want to expand my knowledge of (preferably non-American) history, but I'm having a hard time finding titles or authors that are intellectually serious. For example, I recently tried to read an 800+ page history of the Romanovs, but the author apparently had no interest in talking about anything besides the sex lives of the Tsars. This is what I'm trying to avoid. I've been looking at a lot of "Best of" lists and rankings, but they're all popular history a la Laura Hillenbrand.
I've recently enjoyed reading history books by Mary Beard, Barbara Tuchman, and Kenneth O. Morgan, and I find those authors to be a good compromise between fatuous popular history and dry academic tome. Can anyone pass on any recommendations for books or authors I should check out? Like I said, I'm trying to look beyond American history, and I'm also not as interested in topics like WW2 or Tudor England that have been written about or adapted on screen a thousand times. Other than that, I'm open to pretty much anything in terms of time period or geographic area.
Thanks in advance!
Some popular recommendations on AH from the "serious but an enjoyable reading experience" camp:
I recently finished The Sleepwalkers, how Europe went to war in 1914 by Christopher Clark and definitely recommend it. I feel it offers a very balanced telling of the July crisis that lead to the opening of ww1, and the failure of Europe's diplomats to prevent a continental war.
Do not go to historians for counsel on books, for we will tell you both yea and nea as to whether a book is good.
Here are my suggestions.
Since you Montefiore's The Romanovs rather vapid, there are some engaging works on Russian/Soviet history. The abridged version of Richard Wortman's Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II is not only a landmark text, but a very readable account of how the tsars presented themselves as monarchs. Geoffrey Hosking's Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 is a readable survey of Russian identity and its relationship to the state. For the Soviet period, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics is a recent book on "Team Stalin," the coterie of flunkies and servitors that made up the dictator's entourage. For social history, Karl Schlögel's Moscow 1937 is a massive book, but one that captures the zeitgeist of a pregnant moment in time. It is one of the best books to understand the terror and its whole context.
For early modern studies, Natalie Zemon Davis has made a name for herself by producing readable and pathbreaking works. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives is probably the best introductory book of her output and it shows how three women navigated the changes of the 1600s.
Although it might be more of a textbook-like experience, Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan is a book where a long-lived scholar sought to synthesize everything he knew about Japanese history into a single tome.
J. H. Elliott is another long-lived scholar who still produces interesting work despite his great age. Although you said no US history, Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 is a good book to read because it looks at the parallel developments of British North America and the Spanish Empire. It is also a decent introduction to the concept of the Atlantic World, which is one of the basic paradigms for global history.
Although it is not entirely without its flaws, The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale is another interesting read as to how the Ottoman Empire perceived the maritime revolution and had their own era of "discovery" that was, at least initially, more productive than the Western European one.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Book by Eric H. Cline