Same for me.

I haven't studied literature, nor history, but I've developped a keen interest in both.


Literature have served me numerous times either as an introduction to an era or culture, or as the almost necessary complement to history books. I tend to go by phases (and cycles) about the historical subjects I'm interested in, and most of the time I end up reading literature written in that time and place too. When I'm in a Baroque France phase, for example, I'll usually end up rereading Molière or Racine. A great deal of classics I've read as complements to my readings on history, or they drove me to an history book in the first place.

Aside from fiction, Journals and memoirs have also become a pet interest of mine. We're lucky to have tons of those available in French, for the periods in which it was very fashionable to write and publish those, and they're usually very cheap (there are a few collections specialized in them, and you can download most of those not in print for free from the Bibliothèque Nationale). Nothing like the journal of a protestant apprentice wig-maker condemned to the galleys for attempting to flee to Holland can give you such an immediate and vivid impression of what life was like after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV for example, and nothing like reading Madame de Motteville or Cardinal de Retz give you the vivid picture of what a mess the Fronde was. I rarely read those from cover to cover, but I really love to interrupt my reading of an history book when it mentions some memoirs and go read a bit of the source for myself, then grab some fiction written in that period, and even listening to music too. Fiction and memoirs both give you a far more direct insight into historical periods and people as real flesh and blood individuals. You can feel first hand in memoirs how much we have changed, but also how much we have not changed at all in some many ways (not all of them bad, at that).