Sort of in the vein of Wells The Outline of History?
Sort of. It's definitely still a history book, but it follows an odd narrative form that's impossible to describe. It suppose it helps that I'm interested in the contents, but it actually held my attention for all 845 pages.
TSR isn't actually a company anymore, so maybe you'd enjoy their more recent ones. I only ever read the Dwarven Nations, Legends, Chronicles, and Defenders of magic series. Of these, my favorites were the Defenders of Magic and Chronicles. Defenders of Magic was started a couple years after TSR went kaput, and I actually found the books to be very well written and the characters were neat, but I suppose that that'd be your opinion.
The Chronicles series didn't actually interest me very much, but a couple of the characters piqued my interest. The twins, Caramon and Raistlin, were of particular interest to me because I also have a twin brother, and saw many parallels. Him and I aren't
quite so different, but I thought the authors did a fairly good job of developing the characters as opposite-but-similar-in-many-ways twins. Them alone wouldn't have kept me reading the books, though. The real reason I kept reading this trilogy is because of Sturm. His character spoke to me very profoundly, the idea of a man putting honor, love, and loyalty above all. Even when faced with incredible adversity, he always stuck to his beliefs and never let anything get in his way. He even put his principles above the laws of his order, which is something I could respect. This is probably the reason I liked Don Quixote too, but Sturm wasn't batshit insane, so that helped. Unlike Drizzt Do'Urden, he had quite a few character flaws, but he worked at being a better person constantly. As silly as it sounds, Sturm Brightblade is one of my personal heroes, though he never actually existed. "
Est Sularis Oth Mithas" indeed.