Home We learn by reading
We learn by reading
60 books for a lifetime: the great pillars of literature, the European and Latin American novel, philosophy and the books that accompany a life.
On a terrace.
We learn by reading, by talking to the right people and by observing ourselves.
Juan Villalonga Navarro
The great pillars of literature
- 1
Don Quixote
Probably the book that best shows how literature can be comic, tragic, philosophical and deeply human all at once.
- 2
The Divine Comedy
An entire civilisation condensed into a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. A complete vision of the human being.
- 3
The Odyssey
Journey, home, identity, loyalty, temptation and return. One of the foundational narrative structures of the West.
- 4
The Iliad
War seen through honour, wrath, glory and, in the end, compassion.
- 5
One Thousand and One Nights
Essential for broadening our idea of what a literary and storytelling tradition can be.
- 6
Hamlet
Conscience, death, revenge, doubt, theatre and existence.
- 7
Macbeth
An extraordinary distillation of ambition, guilt and the corruption of power.
The great European novel
- 8
The Brothers Karamazov
It confronts God, freedom, evil, guilt, love and responsibility.
- 9
Anna Karenina
One of the fullest portrayals of human life: love, marriage, society, family, desire and the search for meaning.
- 10
War and Peace
History and private life on a gigantic scale. A literary experience that deserves an unhurried reading.
- 11
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Few works have dealt with the awareness of death with such precision.
- 12
In Search of Lost Time
Memory, time, desire, jealousy, art and transformation.
- 13
Madame Bovary
A fundamental work on desire, dissatisfaction and the distance between the life we imagine and the life we live.
- 14
Middlemarch
One of the great novels about people, decisions, marriage, society and the consequences our choices have for others.
- 15
The Magic Mountain
Illness, time, death, political ideas and Europe's spiritual crisis.
- 16
The Leopard
The decline of a world and the awareness that everything changes while individuals try to hold on to something of what they were.
- 17
The Count of Monte Cristo
Revenge, adventure, identity, fortune and justice. One of those novels you can read for sheer pleasure and reread at another age.
- 18
The Red and the Black
Ambition, social class, intelligence, desire and self-deception.
Modernity, crisis and existence
- 19
Ulysses
One of literature's great experiments. You don't necessarily have to “understand it all”; you have to experience it.
- 20
The Man Without Qualities
The intellectual and moral crisis of a civilisation before its collapse.
- 21
The Master and Margarita
An extraordinary blend of satire, metaphysics, religion, love and the absurd.
- 22
The Stranger
An extraordinary gateway to the problem of the absurd and of existence.
- 23
The Plague
Broader than The Stranger: solidarity, responsibility, suffering and human conduct in a collective crisis.
- 24
Journey to the End of the Night
Dark, bitter and stylistically revolutionary. Important precisely because it brings a radically different voice into the library.
- 25
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Power, language, propaganda, memory and control.
- 26
Brave New World
Best read alongside Orwell, as they imagine different ways in which society can be controlled.
The Americas and the great Latin American literary revolution
- 27
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Family, history, memory, power and myth.
- 28
Love in the Time of Cholera
Love, desire and growing old.
- 29
Ficciones
Brief, intellectual and practically inexhaustible.
- 30
Pedro Páramo
A tiny book in length and a giant in influence.
- 31
The Kingdom of This World
To understand the tradition of the marvellous real and a particular conception of the history of the Americas.
- 32
The Labyrinth of Solitude
A great reflection on identity, culture and solitude.
- 33
The Sound and the Fury
Time, memory, decline and family. One of the great transformations of the 20th-century novel.
- 34
The Great Gatsby
Brief, precise and remarkably effective as a portrait of the American dream, money and desire.
- 35
Moby-Dick
A novel that is also philosophy, adventure, obsession, theology and encyclopaedia.
- 36
Invisible Man
Identity, society, power and invisibility. Essential for broadening the American canon.
- 37
Beloved
Memory, trauma, motherhood and slavery. One of the great American novels of the 20th century.
The world beyond Europe
- 38
Things Fall Apart
Fundamental for seeing colonialism from an African perspective, not only a European one.
- 39
The Tale of Genji
A surprisingly modern work on desire, relationships, beauty, power and transience. It also radically broadens our idea of the history of the novel.
- 40
The Mahabharata
There is no need to start with a complete edition. It stands for an epic, philosophical and religious tradition that is fundamental to Indian civilisation.
- 41
The Analects
The voice of an ethical tradition entirely different from the Graeco-Roman and Christian ones.
- 42
The Sorrow of War
War from a Vietnamese and deeply human perspective, far from traditional epic.
Philosophy, spirituality and how to live
- 43
The Republic
Justice, education, politics, knowledge and human nature.
- 44
Nicomachean Ethics
Directly concerned with a practical question: how should I live?
- 45
Meditations
A man trying to govern himself.
- 46
Letters to Lucilius
More personal and literary than a systematic treatise. Well worth rereading at different stages of life.
- 47
Essays
One of the best intellectual companions for a long life: thinking without always claiming the last word.
- 48
Confessions
A crucial work on memory, desire, guilt, conversion and the search for God.
- 49
The Bible
One of the fundamental sources of Western literature, art, philosophy and culture.
- 50
The Book of Job
What is the meaning of suffering for someone who does not seem to deserve it? One of literature's central questions.
Books to accompany a life
- 51
Parallel Lives
Reading the lives of exceptional men and women as a study of character is a superb complement to novels.
- 52
The Book of Disquiet
Solitude, identity, imagination and consciousness. A book that can mean something completely different at 25, 40 or 70.
- 53
The Little Prince
Worth rereading at different ages.
- 54
The Remains of the Day
Restraint, service, regret, love and the question of how much of our life we have given to something that perhaps did not deserve it.
- 55
The Tree of Knowledge
The conflict between knowledge, action and meaning.
- 56
Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr
Faith, doubt, sacrifice and the human need to believe.
- 57
Life Is a Dream
Reality, freedom, dreams and destiny.
- 58
Kafka on the Shore
Its blend of dream, myth, music, sexuality, solitude and the search for identity captures a contemporary sensibility very well.
- 59
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Memory, war, violence, the unconscious and reality.
- 60
Norwegian Wood
Youth, love, loss and growing up.