Marie Arana's Reading List

Among other things, the author of “Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story” is reading a novel based on a juicy scandal in her own family.

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By the Book: Marie Arana (2019)

NYT By the Book column (2019-08-15).

Source: www.nytimes.com

In the Time of the Butterflies

Julia Alvarez · Buy on Amazon

"She -- a tale of brave souls setting out to spark an insurgency against a brutal caudillo."

The Pioneers

David McCullough · Buy on Amazon

"He -- a story of brave souls setting out to build a new life in the sun."

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu · 2012 · Buy on Amazon

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders · Buy on Amazon

"George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo took my breath away. I finished it with the same feeling I had after reading Dostoyevsky, Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, or Maxine Hong Kingston."

Yevgeny Zamyatin · Buy on Amazon

"I would say Yevgeny Zamyatin's highly dystopian We, the precursor to Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World...It's a pointed lampoon of Soviet society. A truly dissident work."

D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths

Unknown · Buy on Amazon

"In it, you'll learn just about everything you will ever need to know about love, war, power, honor, cowardice, valor, frailty and the essential fragility of our gods."

Speak, Memory

Vladimir Nabokov · Buy on Amazon

"Reading it in my 20s, I fell deeply in love with its visual acuity, its cadences, its almost religious attention to the color of words. It persuaded me that childhood was my best teacher."

The Conquest of the Incas

John Hemming · Buy on Amazon

"I've reread John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas many times in the last few decades."

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