100 Best Latin Books of All Time

Barack ObamaWhen asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia, Obama gave the Times a list that included The Naked and the Dead and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects […] I think she hadn’t read yet. Then there were some books that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting.” Here’s what he... (Source)

Oprah WinfreyBrace yourselves—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is as steamy, dense and sensual as the jungle that surrounds the surreal town of Macondo! (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Mark ZuckerbergOh, it’s not a favorite book or anything like that, I just added it because I liked it. I don’t think there’s any real significance to the fact that it’s listed there and other books aren’t. But there are definitely books—like the Aeneid—that I enjoyed reading a lot more. (Source)

Ryan HolidayI made an effort to read some classical poets and playwrights this year. The Aneiad was far and away the most quotable, readable and memorable of all of them. There’s no other way to put: the story is AMAZING. Better than the Odyssey, better than Juvenal’s Satires. Inspiring, beautiful, exciting, and eminently readable, I loved this. I took more notes on it that I have on anything I’ve read in a... (Source)

Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

Dr. Gabor MatéOne of the seminal books of my childhood. [...] What struck me about Pooh, of course, [was that] there was this bear of little brains who was so much wiser than everybody else. (Source)

Tendai Biti2)Marquez s “Love in the time of cholera” & “100 yrs of solitude “ are two of my top books but one still weeps reading or re- reading Tolstoy s “ War & Peace “a book bettered only by “ Anna Karenina. Not a fan of these motivational books but that “f#cked “ up book is quite funny (Source)

Bryan CallenSo here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood... (Source)

Kate FigesIt’s partly such a passionate book because of the beauty of the prose, describing love through time and how she found contentment – love, passion and sex all in one. (Source)

Susan JacobyThe Confessions is a book that everybody should read. It is seminal, if you can excuse the expression. (Source)

Carlos EireSt Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. (Source)

Richard HarriesHe was a wonderful, wonderful writer and a deeply passionate man. He was very sensual. (Source)

Joe Lycettguys i just read this book called harry potter well worth checking out it’s about a really interesting magic lad (Source)

Arianna HuffingtonI find [this book] so inspirational and instructive, it lives on my nightstand. (Source)

Chip ConleyI have given [this book] away to a number of people. (Source)

Marvin LiaoMy list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make... (Source)

Daniel EkIt was fascinating to talk to [the author] about how this book came to be such a hit—he never backed down, and he allowed people to read it for free in order to then boost sales—much like how Spotify’s freemium model was perceived in the early days. (Source)

Eric RipertSpeaks of everyone having an ultimate goal in life, but most of us are too afraid to pursue it. The encouragement to fulfill your dreams is very inspirational! (Source)

Brené BrownThere's a great quote in [this book]: When you're on the right path the universe conspires to help you! (Source)

James WarrenLucretius produces something quite extraordinary. It’s a poem. It’s long. It’s in six books of about twelve hundred or so lines each, which set out, again, a systematic version of Epicureanism, addressed to this imagined interlocutor called Memmius. Lucretius explains to Memmius, starting from the very first beginnings of Epicurean physics. (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Cressida CowellThe Hobbit is such a richly imagined fantasy that, especially as a child, you can live in it. It is so completely immersive. (Source)

Lev GrossmanFirst up, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by JRR Tolkien. But you knew I was going to say that. This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could... (Source)

Timothy FerrissThis is a letter from Stoic heavyweight Seneca the Younger — who lived a mere 2,000 years or so ago — to his friend Lucilius. It’s from a collection of letters that comprise, effectively, my favorite book of all time. I’ve read it dozens of times, and I loved it so much that I turned it into The Tao of Seneca, a three-volume set of audiobooks. (Source)

Ryan HolidayAfter Marcus Aurelius, this is one of my favorite books. While Marcus wrote mainly for himself, Seneca had no trouble advising and aiding others. In fact, that was his job—he was Nero’s tutor, tasked with reducing the terrible impulses of a terrible man. His advice on grief, on wealth, on power, on religion, and on life are always there when you need them. (Source)

Oliver BurkemanIt’s important to stress that I take a completely mercenary attitude towards Stoicism, picking and choosing the bits that seem to me to be useful techniques for the present day. There are aspects of Stoicism that are very hard to stomach today. For example, the underlying principle that the universe as a whole is in some sense God, with a will or agency of its own, and that rational behaviour... (Source)

Tom HollandIt really had a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of savagery, sexual depravity and brutal, bawdy splendour. (Source)

Charlotte HigginsCatullus was a Roman poet who lived from about 84 to 54 BC, so he was a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar. There are poems that are funny and obscene, there are poems that are astonishingly beautiful and delicate, there are angry, hot, throbbing poems about loss, there are charming poems about his home and family, there are poems that are incredibly learned – almost T S Eliot-like in their... (Source)

Mary BeardThis is the best work of history ever written. (Source)

Timothy FerrissRaised in a culture where men are powerful, sexual, and dominant, the Klingon-speaking, D&D-playing chubby boy thinks he’ll never find true love or physical affection. Oscar struggles as a young immigrant from the Dominican Republic living with his older sister and mother in Paterson, New Jersey. A fun read with lots of geek culture, great history, and oh, it also won the Pulitzer Prize. (Source)

Kushanava ChoudhuryOscar Wao is very real to me. When I read Wao, I think, there but for the grace of God go I. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is something very hard to find, almost by definition: a literary writer who thinks in abstract terms (the only other such author I've read is Stanislaw Lem). These are philosophical thought experiments in their purest form, yet somehow magically delivered in a playful literary athmosphere. Borges is a mathematical philosopher, first and last. Ignore the "Latin American" categorization and... (Source)

Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerBorges asks what happens if we can’t forget? Will we be forever tied to an excruciatingly detailed past? Or will we be able to forget parts of it over time and therefore be able to evolve and move on? (Source)

Mohsin HamidThere is a transnational quality to Borges’s writing. (Source)

Kate MilnerThe exuberance and the sheer energy of it is just fantastic. The rhyme and the repetition give it even more momentum and energy. (Source)

Carlo RovelliHorace is the great cantor of time, of the effect of the flight of time upon our deepest emotions. (Source)

Jeffrey BenekerAgricola is a tribute to his father-in-law and it’s really nice to have this family connection. A lot of ancient literature can oftentimes seem so distant and cold that it’s hard to see the human connection, but it’s strong in this book. In the introduction and especially in the conclusion you can feel the real bond that Tacitus must have felt with this person. (Source)

Ryan HolidaySeneca’s letters are the best place to start, but the essays in On the Shortness of Life are excellent as well. (Source)

Chip ConleySays something about the fact that it’s not so much the shortness of life, it’s how we waste it. (Source)

Maria PopovaTo remind ourselves of this profound failure, Maria, I, and at least six other guests in this book read and recommend On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. (Source)

Craig MillerFor 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)

John KingIf you are going to think about Latin American literature, Borges is always a good place to start. (Source)

Nicholas ShakespeareNo writer embodied libraries more than the immobile, blind Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. (Source)

Ellen Wayland-SmithAugustine’s City of God created the distinction between the ‘City of God,’ which is perfect, and the earthly city, where we live day-to-day. (Source)

John KingI 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... (Source)

Ellen Wayland-SmithMore was building on older ideas about an earlier age, an Edenic state, when private property didn’t exist. (Source)

Seth Mandel@kampeas My favorite Dr. Seuss book has always been The Grinch Owns The Libs (Source)

Gary BuryTruthfully, I have 3 young kids so don’t get much time to read other than to my kids at bedtime. So you’ll understand when I say my favourite books are Children's books by Dr Seuss, they’re a joy to read and cover a range of social and political issues with an elegance and simplicity that exceeds many adult books. The anti materialism/ consumerism ‘Grinch Who Stole Christmas’ and ‘The Lorax’... (Source)

Harry MountIt’s a brilliant book explaining how and why Latin became the European language. (Source)

Stephen CaveThis story is about a Roman officer who finds the fountain of youth, a river that cleanses men of death, as he puts it. He becomes an immortal and meets the other immortals who have found the river, and the story is about the consequences of this – namely, madness and meaninglessness. There’s a great deal of speculation among philosophers and religious types about what it might be like to live... (Source)

Adam Conover@TheBaltimoreSon @CharlesCMann Sure it! A total revolution in my understanding of history, all in one book. Amazing stuff. (Source)

Scott KeyesIt’s one of those books that takes everything you thought you knew about the history of European colonialists and indigenous groups in the Americas and turns it on its head. Just a fascinating deep-dive into early American history that questions a lot of dogma we were taught in school. (Source)

Colin CallowayThe book provides a huge hemispheric overview. (Source)

Oscar HijuelosThis 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)

Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

John GittingsHomer, like Shakespeare, encompassed all humanity in his work, and in The Iliad he encompasses peace as well as war. (Source)

Kate McLoughlinA lot of people who had public school educations, classical educations, might have gone into the First World War thinking that they were fighting Homer’s war. (Source)