Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

The most reliable portal into another’s psyche is the mental library of that person’s favorite books — those foundational idea-bricks of which we build the home for our interior lives, the integral support beams of our personhood and values. And who doesn’t long for such a portal into humanity’s most robust yet spacious minds? Joining history’s notable reading lists — including those of Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson — is Gabriel García Márquez.

Woven into Living to Tell the Tale (public library) — the autobiography that gave us the emboldening story of García Márquez’s unlikely beginnings as a writer — is the reading that shaped his mind and creative destiny. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” García Márquez writes, and kindred-spirited readers instantly know that memorable books are the existential markers of life’s lived and remembered chapters.

Here are the books that most influenced García Márquez — beginning with his teenage years at boarding school, of which he recalls: “The best thing at the liceo were the books read aloud before we went to sleep.” — along with some of the endearing anecdotes he tells about them.

1. The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann

The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause.

2. The Man in the Iron Mask (free ebook | public library) by Alexandre Dumas
3. Ulysses (free ebook | public library) by James Joyce

One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the complete names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared with his bishop’s authority:

“This is the other Bible.”

It was, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. It was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books.

4. The Sound and the Fury (public library) by William Faulkner

I became aware that my adventure in reading Ulysses at the age of twenty, and later The Sound and the Fury, were premature audacities without a future, and I decided to reread them with a less biased eye. In effect, much of what had seemed pedantic or hermetic in Joyce and Faulkner was revealed to me then with a terrifying beauty and simplicity.

5. As I Lay Dying (public library) by William Faulkner
6. The Wild Palms (public library) by William Faulkner
7. Oedipus Rex (free ebook | public library) by Sophocles

[The writer] Gustavo [Ibarra Merlano] brought me the systematic rigor that my improvised and scattered ideas, and the frivolity of my heart, were in real need of. And all that with great tenderness and an iron character.

[…]

His readings were long and varied but sustained by a thorough knowledge of the Catholic intellectuals of the day, whom I had never heard of. He knew everything that one should know about poetry, in particular the Greek and Latin classics, which he read in their original versions… I found it remarkable that in addition to having so many intellectual and civic virtues, he swam like an Olympic champion and had a body trained to be one. What concerned him most about me was my dangerous contempt for the Greek and Latin classics, which seemed boring and useless to me, except for the Odyssey, which I had read and reread in bits and pieces several times at the liceo. And so before we said goodbye, he chose a leather-bound book from the library and handed it to me with a certain solemnity. “You may become a good writer,” he said, “but you’ll never become very good if you don’t have a good knowledge of the Greek classics.” The book was the complete works of Sophocles. From that moment on Gustavo was one of the decisive beings in my life, for Oedipus Rex revealed itself to me on first reading as the perfect work.

8. The House of the Seven Gables (free ebook | public library) by Nathaniel Hawthorne

[Gustavo Ibarra] lent me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, which marked me for life. Together we attempted a theory of the fatality of nostalgia in the wanderings of Ulysses Odysseus, where we became lost and never found our way out. Half a century later I discovered it resolved in a masterful text by Milan Kundera.

9. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (free ebook | public library) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
10. Moby-Dick (free ebook | public library) by Herman Melville
11. Sons and Lovers (free ebook | public library) by D.H. Lawrence
12. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (free ebook | public library)

I even dared to think that the marvels recounted by Scheherazade really happened in the daily life of her time, and stopped happening because of the incredulity and realistic cowardice of subsequent generations. By the same token, it seemed impossible that anyone from our time would ever believe again that you could fly over cities and mountains on a carpet, or that a slave from Cartagena de Indias would live for two hundred years in a bottle as a punishment, unless the author of the story could make his readers believe it.

13. The Metamorphosis (public library) by Franz Kafka

I never again slept with my former serenity. [The book] determined a new direction for my life from its first line, which today is one of the great devices in world literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” [I realized that] it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again, not in her millenary world where everything was possible but in another irreparable world where everything had already been lost. When I finished reading The Metamorphosis I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise.

14. The Aleph and Other Stories (public library) by Jorge Luis Borges
15. The Collected Stories (public library) by Ernest Hemingway
16. Point Counter Point (public library) by Aldous Huxley
17. Of Mice and Men (public library) by John Steinbeck
18. The Grapes of Wrath (public library) by John Steinbeck
19. Tobacco Road (public library) by Erskine Caldwell
20. Stories (public library) by Katherine Mansfield
21. Manhattan Transfer (public library) by John Dos Passos
22. Portrait of Jennie (public library) by Robert Nathan
23. Orlando (public library) by Virginia Woolf
24. Mrs. Dalloway (public library) by Virginia Woolf

It was the first time I heard the name of Virginia Woolf, whom he [Gustavo Ibarra] called Old Lady Woolf, like Old Man Faulkner. My amazement inspired him to the point of delirium. He seized the pile of books he had shown me as his favorites and placed them in my hands.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he said, “take them all, and when you finish reading them we’ll come get them no matter where you are.”

For me they were an inconceivable treasure that I did not dare put at risk when I did not have even a miserable hole where I could keep them. At last he resigned himself to giving me the Spanish version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, with the unappealable prediction that I would learn it by heart.

[…]

I went [home] with the air of someone who had discovered the world.

Living to Tell the Tale is a glorious read in its entirety — the humbling and infinitely heartening life-story of one of the greatest writers humanity ever produced. Couple it with Old Lady Woolf on how one should read a book.

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Joan Didion’s Favorite Books of All Time, in a Handwritten Reading List

A living anatomy of influences, from Brontë to Baldwin.

Having long lamented the dearth of reading lists by female cultural icons — amid a wealth of excellent but chromosomally skewed ones by such luminaries as Leo Tolstoy, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson — I set out to find a worthy counterpoint. And what worthier addition than Joan Didion, one of the most singular and influential writers of our time, whose reflections on self-respect and grief are nothing short of life-changing?

Thanks to directors Susanne Rostock and Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew, who are making a documentary about her, I was delighted to obtain a list of the beloved author’s all-time favorite books. Given her strong convictions about the value of keeping a notebook, it’s at once utterly unsurprising and utterly delightful that the reading list is penned in her own hand, on a page of her notebook:

1. A Farewell to Arms (public library) by Ernest Hemingway
2. Victory (public library) by Joseph Conrad
3. Guerrillas (public library) by V.S. Naipaul
4. Down and Out in Paris and London (public library) by George Orwell
5. Wonderland (public library) by Joyce Carol Oates
6. Wuthering Heights (public library) by Emily Brontë
7. The Good Soldier (public library) by Ford Madox Ford
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude (public library) by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
9. Crime and Punishment (public library) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. Appointment in Samarra (public library) by John O’Hara
11. The Executioner’s Song (public library) by Norman Mailer
12. The Novels of Henry James (public library): Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw
13. Speedboat (public library) by Renata Adler
14. Go Tell It on the Mountain (public library) by James Baldwin
15. Notes of a Native Son (public library) by James Baldwin
16. The Berlin Stories (public library) by Christopher Isherwood
17. Collected Poems (public library) by Robert Lowell
18. Collected Poems (public library) by W.H. Auden
19. The Collected Poems (public library) by Wallace Stevens

Complement with Didion on telling stories, why she writes, her answers to the Proust Questionnaire, and Vanessa Redgrave’s gorgeous reading from the author’s memoir, then revisit the greatest books of all time, as voted by 125 famous contemporary authors.

Here is a delectable taste of the Didion documentary:

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Rereading as Rebirth: Young Susan Sontag on Personal Growth, the Pleasures of Revisiting Beloved Books, and Her Rereading List

“Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!”

Recently, in writing about astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s answer when asked what books “every intelligent person on the planet should read,” I lamented in a semi-aside the complete lack of female voices among his selections and the general lack of female cultural icons’ public reading lists in our culture, noting that Susan Sontag is arguably the only exception, as her published diaries are essentially one lifelong reading list. But in addition to being perhaps the twentieth century’s most voracious reader, often spending eight to ten hours a day reading by her own estimate, Sontag was also a great advocate and practitioner of another infinitely rewarding yet increasingly lost art: rereading.

“Let me note all the sickening waste of today, that I shall not be easy with myself and compromise my tomorrows,” resolves 15-year-old Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 (public library) — that spectacular collection of diary entries, which also gave us young Sontag on art, marriage, the four people a great writer must be, and her duties for being a twenty-something. A week after her indignation at the “sickening waste” of that day, on which she had “pretended to enjoy a Technicolor blood-and-thunder movie,” Sontag — who had a penchant for worthy resolutions — turns to the journals of André Gide for redemption and extols the rewards of rereading.

Susan Sontag

Photograph: New York Times Co. archive / Getty Images; courtesy of HBO Documentary Films / Regarding Susan Sontag

In an entry from September of 1948, she writes:

I finished reading this at 2:30 a.m. of the same day I acquired it —

I should have read it much more slowly and I must re-read it many times — Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! Thus I do not think: “How marvelously lucid this is!” — but: “Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!”

For, I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself, and this unique and enormous experience has purged my mind of much of the confusion and sterility that has clogged it all these horrible months.

A few months later, she once again waxes rapturous about rereading:

I was very moved by the Goethe, although I think I’m far from understanding it — the [Christopher] Marlowe [play Doctor Faustus] is just about mine though — for I’ve put a good deal of time into it, re-reading it several times, and declaiming many of the passages aloud again and again. Faustus’ final soliloquy I have read aloud a dozen times in the past week. It is incomparable…

Somewhere, in an earlier notebook, I confessed a disappointment with the Mann [Doctor] Faustus … This was a uniquely undisguised evidence of the quality of my critical sensibility! The work is a great and satisfying one, which I’ll have to read many times before I can possess it…

I’m re-reading pieces of things that have always been important to me, and am amazed at my evaluations.

After remarking that she is also rereading Dante “with undiminished pleasure” and T.S. Eliot, “of course,” Sontag adds a note of enthusiastic praise for the virtues of reading out loud:

It is so good to read aloud.

In a testament to one of Italo Calvino’s 14 definitions of a classic — “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…,’ never ‘I’m reading…'” — here are a few of Sontag’s favorite rereads, as recorded in her journal:

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena by Gertrude Stein
• On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
• The Journals of André Gide
• Faust by Goethe
• The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
• The Immoralist by André Gide
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham
• Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
• Muirhead’s Guide to London by Findlay Muirhead

In addition to her rereading, Reborn offers a magnificent record of Sontag’s voracious reading, as does the second installment of her published diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980 — an altogether superb volume brimming with such gems as Sontag on love, sex, and her radical vision for remixing education.

Complement with Andy Miller on the slippery question of what makes a great book, then revisit Sontag on why lists appeal to us.

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Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List: 28 Favorite Books That Shaped His Mind and Music

From Montaigne’s philosophy to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, literary anatomy of the creative icon.

“A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her beautiful essay on reading and writing. It is also, perhaps, a seed planted in another’s garden of consciousness. It is no coincidence that most highly creative people are voracious readers — books, after all, enable us to live multiple lives in one by giving us access to emotions and experiences impossible to compress into a single lifetime, and creativity is the combinatorial product of all the ideas and experiences floating around our minds. To peek inside a creative icon’s lifelong reading list is to glimpse his or her existential library of the mind — the range of ideas and influences and inspirations that were fused together into the work for which that person is known and beloved.

Joining the previously published reading lists of notable luminaries — including those of Leo Tolstoy, Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, Nick Cave, David Bowie, and Brian Eno — is singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, one of the most influential and celebrated musicians of the twentieth century, and the recipient of twenty Grammy Awards. In a recent New York Times interview, marking the release of his charming picture-book Outlaw Pete (public library), Springsteen shares the books that shaped his music and his mind, from poetry to philosophy to children’s books — an eclectic reading list spanning numerous genres and sensibilities, life stages and moods. (Favorite childhood book: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; last book that made him laugh: Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land; last book that made him cry: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road).

1. Moby-Dick (free download; public library | IndieBound) by Herman Melville
2. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (public library | IndieBound) by Sarah Bakewell
3. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (public library | IndieBound) by Dennis Overbye
4. Love in the Time of Cholera (public library| IndieBound) by Gabriel García Márquez
5. Anna Karenina (free download; public library | IndieBound) by Leo Tolstoy
6. Leaves of Grass (public library | IndieBound) by Walt Whitman
7. The History of Western Philosophy (public library | IndieBound) by Bertrand Russell
8. Examined Lives (public library | IndieBound) by Jim Miller
9. American Pastoral (public library | IndieBound) by Philip Roth
10. I Married a Communist (public library | IndieBound) by Philip Roth
11. Blood Meridian (public library | IndieBound) by Cormac McCarthy
12. The Road (public library | IndieBound) by Cormac McCarthy
13. The Sportswriter (public library | IndieBound) by Richard Ford
14. The Lay of the Land (public library | IndieBound) by Richard Ford
15. Independence Day (public library | IndieBound) by Richard Ford
16. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (public library | IndieBound) by Flannery O’Connor
17. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (public library | IndieBound) by Greil Marcus
18. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (public library | IndieBound) by Peter Guralnick
19. Chronicles (public library | IndieBound) by Bob Dylan
20. Sonata for Jukebox (public library | IndieBound) by Geoffrey O’Brien
21. Soul Mining: A Musical Life (public library | IndieBound) by Daniel Lanois
22. Too Big to Fail (public library | IndieBound) by Andrew Ross Sorkin
23. Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (public library | IndieBound) by Dale Maharidge
24. The Big Short (public library | IndieBound) by Michael Lewis
25. The Brothers Karamazov (free download; public library | IndieBound) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. Great Short Works (public library | IndieBound) by Leo Tolstoy
27. The Adventures of Augie March (public library | IndieBound) by Saul Bellow
28. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (public library | IndieBound) by L. Frank Baum

Complement Springsteen’s Outlaw Pete with a sweet illustrated adaptation of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.”

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Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

? $7 / month? $3 / month? $10 / month? $25 / month

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