TOPIC · 43 BOOKS
History
Books I have read about history, brought together across genres, periods and countries.
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👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentKoba the Dread
Martin AmisA very personal and very hard book about Stalin, communism and the ease with which part of the western left relativized its crimes.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodThe Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)
Robert SpencerA controversial book on Islam and the Crusades that raises interesting historical issues and forces us to discuss some simplified accounts.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentThe Black book of communism
Stéphane CourtoisA huge and very hard book on the repression and crimes committed by different communist regimes, which I found very important because of the number of cases and countries it brings together, although it requires time and attention.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodEl año del verano que nunca llegó
William OspinaThrough his research, Ospina reconstructs what happened near Geneva in the unusual summer of 1816, when the weather brought Byron and the Shelleys together and helped give birth to Frankenstein. I really liked the way it connects the history and the anecdotes.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodMediohombre
Álber VázquezA great historical novel about Blas de Lezo’s defence of Cartagena de Indias. It is gripping because it recounts events day by day, but also because of the action, characters and dialogue. It is fascinating to see how Blas de Lezo defended the city successfully against overwhelming British forces.
👍🏼GoodVasco Núñez de Balboa
Álber VázquezI've loved the story, and I've enjoyed the dialogue because it's written very realistically, with the insults that would certainly have been said in its day. But many stages of adventure have become too long for me, too deep at non-key moments, which makes the book slow to read.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThis novel recounts the harsh living conditions in a gulag (Soviet labour camp) through the experience of the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich, who is already imprisoned eight years out of a sentence of ten.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentEndurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Alfred LansingProbably the best book I've read in years. The true story of Shackleton and his team's attempt to cross Antarctica, everything they went through, is incredible. And told by many of their survivors.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentLeo Africanus
Amin MaaloufSomeone gave it to me 25 years ago and I only read it now. I understand why they chose it for me. It is the story of a Muslim from Granada forced to flee when Isabella and Ferdinand took the city, followed through a lifetime of adventures around the Mediterranean and as far as Timbuktu, a place I have always wanted to visit. It is both a great novel and a vivid portrait of the period.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodUn caballero en Moscú
Amor TowlesA slow but intense novel set in the Moscow of the revolution, full of life lessons, interesting cultural and historical references and an unexpected ending.
✋🏼MehMéjico
Antonio OrtuñoI finished it just because I like to read things about Mexico. But I didn't like the story, or the writing style that the author uses. Too twisted, too many parallel stories, and when I got to the end, I regretted having read it all.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentThe Last Oil: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Whaling
Aslak BergeIt tells how whaling in Antarctica became a huge global industry, how factory ships and whaling stations worked, and the role that Argentina, the South Atlantic islands and companies like Unilever played, which was one of the biggest buyers of whale oil. It's a book of economic, maritime and business history filled with characters, technology, money, and adventures in some of the most remote places on earth.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentThe Last Leonardo
Ben LewisThe story of the world's most expensive painting, DaVinci's Salvator Mundi. It talks about how it was found, the doubts about its authorship, how the art world took it.
✋🏼MehUn libro guay sobre aviones
Darío BorhaniI saw it recommended in an aviation blog and I bought it and I was wrong a very basic book with things that everyone knows, I love the world of aviation but this book has brought me nothing.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodPaseo de la Reforma
Elena PoniatowskaNovel based in the Mexico of the 50s and 60s that explains very well what Mexican upper middle class is like and class difference through its characters.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodDos aguas
Esteban DuperlyThe story of an Austrian Jewish immigrant and a black fisherman descended from slaves on the Colombian Pacific coast during the 1940s.
👍🏼GoodTintin - Hergé, una vida del siglo XX
Fernando CastilloI came to read about Tintin, and I've read a treatise on the history of the 20th century.
👍🏼GoodTrust
Hernán DíazIt explores how great fortunes, and the legends around them, are constructed in the world of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century financiers and industrialists. By offering several versions of the same story, it makes you question who controls the narrative, what is hidden and who is erased, particularly the wife. I really liked the idea and the atmosphere, although I found parts of it difficult.
👍🏼GoodHistoria del rock andaluz
Ignacio Díaz PérezA great book about the best musical genre that Spain has given, told by its protagonists.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodIsland beneath the sea
Isabel AllendeGreat novel about a slave girl in Haiti and New Orleans at the end of the 18th century. It starts slowly, but it's a very well-told, intense and exciting story.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodLos genios
Jaime BaylyWith a mixture of reality and fiction, this book tells the life, friendship and then the fight between Vargas Llosa and García Márquez. It's a very entertaining book about two of the great Latin American authors of the twentieth century and the relationship they had with each other and with other authors.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodRunning
Jean EchenozThe life of Emil Zatopek, a Czech runner from the 1940s who without any style (they laughed at the faces he wore when running) or sports training, broke all the records in athletics at his time, even at the Olympics. And living within the communist regime, which also posed him several problems.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodLightning
Jean EchenozIt's not a biography of Nikola Tesla as such, but through another character, Jean Echenoz tells many real situations and stories about Tesla. Very interesting and very entertaining.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodThe fix
Jonathan TeppermanTen examples of nations that have managed to overcome extreme situations by counting the solutions, which shows that everything has a remedy. The first example is bad, the rest are VERY good and interesting. Examples of concrete actions from countries like Mexico, Canada, Indonesia, Botswana,.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodSlaughterhouse-Five
Kurt VonnegutWhat a rare and entertaining novel at once, dramatic and with a lot of dark humor, mixing up several stories at once and don't miss the thread, from the bombing of Dresden, an airplane crash, and travels to the planet Tralfamadore.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentEl maestro Juan Martínez que estaba allí
Manuel Chaves NogalesThe story of a flamenco dancer and his wife, Sole, who, after working in Europe, end up in Russia and Ukraine caught up in the 1917 Revolution and communism. What a great account of that time, and what a funnier and harder book for the situations so many people went through.
👍🏼GoodThe Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
Mark KurlanskyOne of the most curious books I have read, and endlessly interesting. It is a journey through New York’s history told through oysters: their surprising role in construction, commerce and the lives of rich and poor.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodArquímedes Puccio, el siniestro líder del clan
Mente CriminalThe story of an Argentine family that in the 1980s kidnapped businessmen, locked them up in their own house (in a bathroom), and then, upon collecting the ransom, killed them.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodLatitudes Piratas
Michael CrichtonNothing I like more than a pirate novel, and this is my favorite of all the novels I've ever read. It's about an English privateer trying to steal a hidden treasure from a Spanish galleon on an island in the Caribbean.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodEl meridiano de Cádiz
Miguel Ramos GrossoAn informative book, short and easy to read about the history of the Meridian of Cádiz, forgotten by history.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodCervantes para cabras, Marx para ovejas
Pablo Santiago ChiqueroFunny novel based on an Andalusian town in the '20s, I thought I wouldn't like it and I loved it.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodEl reparto de África
Roberto CeamanosOr how the Europeans destroyed and complicated the future of Africa by our greed and moral superiority - which we still retain.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodLos paseos de la ciudad de México
Salvador NovoA historic tour of the main walks in Mexico City: Alameda, Bucarelli, Reforma, Chapultepec. I've enjoyed getting to know the CdMx more deeply through those walks that I've done thousands of times.
👍🏼GoodEl guardián de la calle Amsterdam
Sergio SchmuclerThe story of a child born in the 1930s who never left his home in the Condesa Colony in Mexico City. It's not a great story, but it has made me very nostalgic for a time I didn't live.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodTimekeepers
Simon GarfieldI really enjoyed this book as I documented writing my own. It's a cultural history of our obsession with measuring, controlling and harnessing time, told through clocks, trains, calendars, music, sports and lots of curious stories. One of the ideas that stuck with me was that Beethoven never got to travel more than 30 miles an hour, a very simple way to understand how much the world has accelerated.
👍🏼GoodLand
Simon WinchesterSometimes very intense and slow, it is a very interesting book to understand the earth as an object of human desire. Everyone wants to have their land, and in the book they explain from the beginning of time how it has worked, evolution, change of hands, rights, and I really liked it very much.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentThe Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin
Stefan ZweigWhat I like most about Zweig's biographies and historical books is that his own opinion is intertwined in the narrative and how he intuits and imagines the way the protagonists reason, as if it were inside his mind.
👍🏼👍🏼Very goodMessages from a Lost World
Stefan ZweigA collection of essays on European writers and artists who, for Stefan Zweig, define what Europe is as a unique entity.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentShooting Stars: Ten Historical Miniatures
Stefan ZweigOne of my favorite books in the universe. Probably the book I've read the most with The Count of Monte Cristo. Zweig brings together specific moments that ended up changing the course of history. I love it because it shows that history also depends on accidents, mistakes, obsessions and people who arrive a few minutes late.
👍🏼GoodThe Island of the Day Before
Umberto EcoA very appropriate novel for the journey I was making that year, when I literally crossed to the day before at the end of the year, flying from Samoa to American Samoa. It follows a seventeenth-century castaway trapped on a ship anchored near the International Date Line. The premise is fascinating and some of its stories hook you, but Eco’s style is complex and can feel heavy. It takes effort at first and, even once accustomed to it, I prefer authors who are more generous with an ordinary reader like me.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentLa disputa del pasado: España, México y la leyenda negra
Varios AutoresIt's the most interesting thing I've read in years. Seven Spanish and Mexican authors write about the Black Legend of the conquest, tell very interesting historical facts, and how the Anglo-Saxons manipulated history for and against Spain. It's a bookstore, I've learned a lot and now I see everything from a different perspective.
👍🏼👍🏼⭐️ExcellentThe Pillars of the Earth
Ken FollettWhat I like most is the evolution of the characters throughout the novel and how different stories intersect around the construction of the cathedral. It's very long, but you go through so many things and you accompany the characters for so many years that you end up feeling like you've lived several lives within the same book.
👍🏼👍🏼Very good