This may seem really simple, but when I was very young I read the Little House on the Prarie books. I read them again last year, just to see if they were as good as I’d remembered and I still enjoyed them. There are also books by/about Laura Ingalls Wilder that are written for adults rather than children.
Make that The Land Remembers.
I would add Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday (though all of his books are great, IMHO). East of Eden (maybe my favorite book ever) is a great look into human nature as well, though it’s not a quick read.
Travels With Charley is terrific too, as Jinx said.
There is a whole series of Writer’s Guide books that discuss all aspects of everyday life in periods like :
Elizabethan and Jocobean England
The Renaissance
Regency And Victorian England
The Middle Ages
The Wild West
Here are some.
Anything by Gary Jennings. Historical fiction, his books go into a lot of detail about different countries’ religions, customs, histories, etc. Most if not all of his books have one or more characters traveling to many different countries. He has a lot of his heroes inventing major things, like guns or eyeglasses, which I think is kind of a funny little thing to do. I’m a big fan.
I don’t quite get the drift of this. You want a recommendation for a book that accurately describes a time period. How are the readers supposed to know if it is accurate? From the book?
*A Gathering of Days * by Joan Blos
Well, either the reader has previous knowledge of the culture depicted in the book, or the book inspired the reader to go learn more about what was written.
I’m trying to stay away from books that just obviously throw historical accuracy out the window.
Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives.
I’m not thinking too fast this morning.
Also of possible interest is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (American Cultural History, Vol 1), by David Hackett Fischer. It looks (rather exhaustively) at four early immigrant groups: Puritans, Quakers, “Tidewater aristocrats” and Scots-Irish.
*1066, The Year of the Conquest*, is an interesting book about about the battle of Hastings told primarily from the perspective of the commoners. Quite a bit of detail about the everyday reality of life under the feudal system and the relations of the various classes. It does have a pro-English bias which, though I’m not of English descent myself, is just fine by me.
Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is set in the American South of the 1930s.
While the heart of the novel is about personal things that are probably universal wherever and whenever people go about on two legs (the secret desires and motivations of a variety of small-town characters with diverse personal histories,) there is a lot of material about contemporary social stresses relating to race, class, and sex, and of course plenty of detail on how folks passed the time.
It’s also tragic and beautiful.
I am now reading the excellent, fascinating and amusingly written Inside the Victorian Home.
I’ve read Dr. Johnson’s London, and am trying to snag a free copy of the author’s upcoming Elizabeth’s London from the publisher . . .
The Red Tent is a work of historical fiction about Dinah, a minor figure in the Old Testament, and deals in fascinating detail with daily life during the early Biblical period.