Fans pick 100 books like The Old Gringo

I love every book Barbara Kingsover writes, but this one is special for me because of its deeply personal account of key 20th-century political events.

Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo are at the centre of a story that juxtaposes Trotsky’s humanistic vision against the inhumanism of Stalin’s Soviet Union and McCarthyism in the United States. All of this is built around the character-driven narrative of a protagonist unwittingly caught up in the political churn of the times. 

Under the Volcano is a difficult book worth the effort. Set in Quauhnahuac, now Cuernavaca, it follows the surreal last day in the life of bleakly alcoholic former British consul Geoffrey Firmin.

We witness interactions with his estranged wife, his half-brother, and a childhood friend—both of whom have probably had an affair with the wife—as well as various other undependable characters real and hallucinatory. For careful readers, Lowry offers a rich buffet of symbolism and allusions to the work of writers from Dante to Shakespeare.

I certainly missed a few of the references but enjoyed the hunt nonetheless. Under the Volcano features the foibles of British rather than American expats, but the lessons apply equally.

If you ask American expats in San Miguel de Allende how they “discovered” this beautiful city in the central highlands as far from a beach as one can be in Mexico, a significant percentage of us will mention Tony Cohan’s lovely memoir, On Mexican Time, set in the San Miguel of 1985.

San Miguel is often referred to as magical, and most of us tend to think of whatever moment we personally arrived as peak San Miguel magic. The longer we’re here, the more nostalgic we grow for that lost era. The thing about magic, though, is that it can evolve. Today’s San Miguel de Allende is less sleepy and quirky than the town Tony described, but it is still abundantly charmed.

South to Freedom tells the relatively unknown story of Americans who moved to Mexico for the most existential of reasons: to flee slavery in the 1840s-1850s.

Although Mexico has its own history of slavery, it abolished that evil earlier than the United States did, and this book provides accounts of Mexican officials and ordinary citizens risking their lives to protect fugitive slaves from pursuing slaveholders.

Southern states believed that annexing Texas and invading Mexico would ensure slavery's continuation, but as Baumgartner shows, those actions were instead among the proximate causes of the Civil War. Baumgartner’s important book enhances the sanitized version of Civil War history I learned in school and sheds light on this noble aspect of Mexican history.

I was immediately hooked by Dr. John Womack's Zapata when I read it in graduate school. His combined storytelling and scholarship abilities are precisely what made me fall in love with history. Furthermore, this book inspired me to write Pancho Villa to complement the narrative of the revolution. Because, while Pancho Villa is the revolutionary leader fighting for the rights of mixed-race working class of the Mexican north, Zapata is the revolutionary leader committed to restoring the dignity and the ancestral lands of the indigenous population of the Mexican south. Here, Womack masterfully weaves Zapata's life with the Mexican Revolution. An unquestionably classic, this book is a praised scholarly work that reads like a novel.

This novel sparked my lifetime obsession regarding Mexican Revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and the U.S. Army’s eventual pursuit of Villa deep into Mexico following his presumed attack on Columbus, New Mexico.

In some ways evoking aspects of Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, this is a blood and thunder coming-of-age novel set against a wartime backdrop and narrated by a young (and future silent movie cowboy star) Tom Mix, who on a romantic whim, decides to cross the border and fight with Villa to overthrow Mexico’s despotic president.

I believe I reread this novel perhaps six times within a year of its 1982 release. Irving also knows something about effectively mixing fact and fiction as the convicted (and incarcerated) author of the notoriously fake Autobiography of Howard Hughes.

With this “traveloir,” Mary Morris showed me how to do it: How to travel alone as a single woman when you didn’t have a plan or an agenda; how to write about people and places that bring them alive; how to find your own story in your travels and in your writing.

Mary Morris published this book in 1989, the year before I set off on my own—a (much older) single woman traveling without a plan or agenda. As I opened the yellowed pages again, after many years, I read this line: “I settled into loneliness once again.” Next year I’ll be traveling to San Miguel de Allende, one of the settings in Nothing to Declare. I may take this book with me and read it again. 

The colonial period of Mexico was a mystery to me, so I turned to the ultimate source, this book by Paz. Surprisingly, I found that I did not agree with all of Paz’s conclusions about Sor Juana and the time she lived. He wrote from a male perspective, a middle-aged scholarly male perspective. Sor Juana was a young woman, a distinguished scholar in her own right. Had she written such a history, it would be quite different.

Sadly, there is no such book written from a woman’s perspective, so I invite you to join me in discovering what nuggets of wisdom you can in this book, truly the ultimate deep dive into Sor Juana’s life and times. Yes, I relied a great deal on Paz’s research. You will find it fascinating too.

This nonfiction history of Mexico was compelling because it details everyday life in the occupied country. It also provided details of the US and Mexico before and after the Mexican War.

We get a clearer sense of what motivated soldiers on both sides to join in the largest territorial battle in North America. For Americans it was a great adventure, for Mexicans, the defense of their homeland. I also like the author's use of irony and humor, which gives the book a balance that more academic history cannot risk.

Oh, this is an amazing book! Hard to read in a few places, because it deals openly with the aftermath of a gruesome suicide. But if you ask me, that’s what readers need – openness about subjects, such as suicide, topics which many people would prefer to avoid altogether. Also, I’ve met author Don Aker and I love him. He told me he got the idea for this story from a real-life suicide that took place in his community.