100 Best Mexico Books of All Time

Rupert Isaacson

Some things, particularly neuro-psychiatric stuff, is better addressed through shamanism. We can contain it with drugs but we certainly don’t have a way of making it a positive thing. [source]

Devon Sawa

“Savages” has knocked out “Power Of The Dog” for my new favorite @donwinslow book. It’s so damn good. Haven’t read “Frankie Machine” yet,though. Like I did with king’s “STAND”, I’m waiting, cause once I’ve read it, I’ve read it and it’s gone. Saving it for the beaches of Vietnam. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene The Quiet American, Graham Greene Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Gandhi’s autobiography Working, Studs Terkel Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren [source]

John King

I have read this once and I keep dipping back into it because it is endlessly fascinating. Roberto Bolaño is a writer who has found a really important way of dealing with the horrors that the 1970s and subsequent decades have inflicted on Latin America. If you look at Borges, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, in a sense they grew up in times of optimism, of high modernism, with the hope, at least initially, that change might be possible. Whereas someone like Bolaño was a young man at the time of the Chilean coup in 1973. He drifted around and went into exile in Mexico and then moved to Spain, a witness to the end of the dream. [source]

Cecile Richards

This has been a favourite of mine for a while, but it’s definitely off the radar of most people so I also want to highlight it for people who don’t know about it. I think it’s a great book. It’s kind of a semi-autobiographical novel but it’s basically about the migration of Mexican families to the US, families that get to California. [source]

Hugh Thomson

I first read this when I was 16 or 17 and it made a strong impression on me. It’s a tough, picaresque novel of the Mexican revolution and of what it was like for the soldiers in the north. It’s a good account of how anarchic that revolution must have been and it still has a lot of verve and power, with images of troops spilling out of the trains, the Dorados, the ‘golden ones’, Pancho Villa’s cavalry. Pancho Villa 1878-1923 was the colourful bandit-hero of the Mexican revolution. [source]

Oscar Hijuelos

This book is an über-homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. It is a gothic piece. It’s a horror, a mystery, a Borgesian sleight of hand. Once you have read it, the effect changes and you become admiring of its technique. But on first reading it is a wonderfully surprising story, with a denouement which in retrospect is predictable but is enchanting. [source]

Hugh Thomson

This came out just at the time that I was making a film in Mexico and following the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes’s route from Veracruz to Mexico City (as it is now – then it was Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital). Cortes reached Tenochtitlán in 1519. I used this book as my bible for retracing his route. Thomas makes clear what an achievement it was, first to dismantle his boats when he arrived and then to advance into this huge and powerful empire, knowing that the Aztecs practised human sacrifice. I mean, whatever you think of the Spaniards and the Conquest, they were undeniably brave. Thomas is good at using Aztec sources, chronicles and stories to show how it seemed from their side. [source]

Alfred A. Knopf

LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE by @ValeriaLuiselli “is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, one which is determined not to let these children be robbed of their innocence or their humanity, by a cruel bureaucracy laboring to make them feel unwelcome.” https://t.co/z2OHFL2KZu [source]

Craig Miller

For those asking, I actually read two books in February. "The House on Mango Street" is one of the most interestingly written books I've ever digested--a beautiful work. And I loved the Shatner book because I love Shatner. #newyearsresolutionstillgoingstrong https://t.co/4TVPbjJAEJ [source]

Francine Mckenna

@JasonDewees @moorehn Beautiful photos in your book. Ferns are not palms but you may enjoy this book. I listened to it in one of my last drives from DC to Chicago for the Oaxaca angle. https://t.co/9CIPfU4ahE [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic accounts how a few tiny studies on low rates of opium addiction for hospital patients lead to a whole new paradigm for treating pain in the US. From mid 90s to late 2000s, opium pain pills were basically considered non-addictive by much of the medical community. This led to crazy over-prescription, subsequent addiction, and a whole new market for heroin once someone was hooked and couldn’t afford the pills. This heroin market was served in large parts by on-demand delivery services driven by small-town Mexican heroin cells. It’s really an interesting tale of medical hubris, corporate greed, the devastation of whole areas to addiction, and more. It could have used a lot more editing, though. So many phrases, “black-tar heroin delivered like pizza”, just keep repeating over and over again. But it’s a solid recount of how we got to this tragic point that opium overdoses is now a leading cause of death for many demographic groups in the US. More people die from drug overdoses than from car crashes now. Tragic. [source]

Johann Hari

It’s a study of Ciudad Juarez, a city in northern Mexico, on the border with the United States. At the time Charles Bowden was there, it was the deadliest city in the world. [source]