Last night, I completed reading the third installment of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. It took me nearly 3 years to read through ~1800 pages of text. I must say that I enjoyed it thoroughly. The entire work truly reads like a novel should, with an interesting plot, character development (compare Lincoln, Grant, and Jeff Davis at the start of the books versus the end), and so forth. While incredibly well researched, it is not what I would call "scholarly" in the sense that Foote attempts to back up every other sentence with a footnote. Indeed, footnotes are missing, which eliminates the distraction. Scholarly historical works and biographies can read like novels. Indeed, the Edmund Morris texts on Theodore Roosevelt are obvious examples of excellent, but more scholarly work.
My advice to anyone who enjoys reading good stories is to pick up a boxed set and dive in. Spend a few years learning about what are arguably the most important 4 years in American History. You will be richer for the experience.
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