20 great books to read

Some days ago I found an interesting list by The Guardian, which comprised the 100 Best Books of All Time according to many critics. Of course the "all time" is still going on, but it's anyway a great list with writers from almost everywhere in the world. I chose 20 books out of their whole list.

There's plenty of good books to read (from classical books to dystopias). The first 10 books I have already read or heard of, and they are really amazing, the last 10 I really want to read!

Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier

1.   One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez);

2.   Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes);

3.   The Devil to Pay in the Backlandes (Guimarães Rosa);

4.   The Trial (Franz Kafka);

5.   The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (Leo Tolstoy);

6.    War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy);

7.   Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky);

8.   Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert);

9.   Blindness (José Saramago);

10. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky);

11. The book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa);

12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri);

13. Hamlet (Shakespeare);

14. Oedipus the King (Sophocles);

15. 1984 (George Orwell);

16. Collected Fictions (Jorge Luis Borges);

17. Dead souls (Nikolai Gogol);

18. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë);

19. Thousand and One Nights;

20. The Odyssey (Homer).

Being from Latin America, I expected to see more writers from here on the list, but the ones who are there really deserve it because their books are really great and their novels have addressed part of human worldviews concerning many issues (one of the best novels I've ever read One Hundred Years of Solitude addresses pratically everything I ever thought of, including the solitude feeling itself).

Curiosity, that's the key this list gives to us. Once I read the great Dostoyevsky and got interested to read other writers of his time. The same happened when I read George Orwell and so on. This kind of list may guide us and/or introduce us to a literature we haven't heard of yet, what is very good.

After reading The Guardian's list and writing a similar post to this one in Portuguese, I wanted to know what Latin American writers (who write in Spanish and Portuguese) could be worth reading too (a part of them, of course, according to some criteria, etc.). I carried on a little research on some books and on Internet pages and my outcome is my post Top 15 Latin American Writers.

Versão em Português