11 Comments

Poignant post ❤️ Same should be said about the Substacks people follow and subscribe too. It’s so important to diverse our pallets in every way possible. Thank you for speaking on this.

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If you’re after Māori books, I would highly recommend Auē by Becky Manawatu. Devastating but beautiful and tender.

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That's pretty cool! Thanks!

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Love this list! I recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude and was totally floored by it (in the best way). Love in the Time of Cholera has been on my list since! Also added a few more of these to my TBR.

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I think one of the things that makes One Hundred Years so good is its humor. That’s a pretty wild family, and eccentric families are something many readers like to read about.

My favorite Marquez, though, is The Autumn of the Patriarch, with its long, elegant, run-on sentences:

“Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.”

Great writers also get the best translators. With Marquez into English, that was Gregory Rabassa, who also translated Julio Cortázar.

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Have you read The Alienist by Machado de Assis?

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Yep! Pretty good. It’s a book we usually read in school in Brazil 😊

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This is a great list!

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For the last section, presumably you meant "Eastern Europe"?

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(I'd definitely recommend both of the books you mentioned, in addition to some of the other major classics by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, respectively -- they're all quite different in terms of vibe!)

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Yes!!! Haha my mistake 🙈

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