I'd definitely recommend the books too - they're nothing hugely fancy in terms of prose style or anything, once you've read one Bernard Cornwell book you've sort of read most of them, but I'm always happy to read them even so - they're just really good straightforwardly played sword-swinging adventure stories, backed up by solid historical research. He's very good at writing battle scenes too; IIRC the sort of close-pressed fights he evokes were a major influence on the devs of M&B for the feel they were aiming for.
(He's also done a high medieval series, the Grail Quest books, which I really like).
