More for the Bookshelf

A while back, on one of my wanderings in Mexico City, I came to one of the branches of "El Pédulo", a chain of really cool stores that are a combination coffee shop and bookshop.  I went inside to browse, without any intention of buying anything.  However, I saw a thick, historical novel which caught my attention.

 The book is called "México" and is written by Pedro Angel Palou.  I had never heard of the author before.  I did some research on him later.  He is a novelist, journalist, historian and educator.  For a few years (2005 - 2007) he was the president of the University of the Americas, the school that I attended the winter quarter of my junior year of college (my first trip to Mexico, some 50 years ago).  He now lives in Boston where he is the head of the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University.  

This novel seems to be similar to the format used by authors such as James Michener and Edmund Rutherford.  He has created four fictional families of differing backgrounds living in Mexico City.  He traces their story through the generations, presenting a panorama of the city's history from the Spanish conquest in 1521 to the catastrophic earthquake of 1985.  It's over 500 pages... all written in Spanish... but it sounds like a very interesting book.

Last weekend Alejandro and I were downtown, and we stopped in another bookstore (this one part of the chain known as "Gandhi").  They had a fairly large selection of books in English, and I picked up a couple more for my bookshelf.  

One of them is a translation of a historical novel by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.  The book is a novelization of the life of British diplomat, Roger Casement, who exposed the exploitation of natives in the Peruvian Amazon by rubber companies in the late 19th century.  He was later executed by the British government for his participation in the Irish uprising against British rule.

The other book I bought was "And Then There Were None", a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.  You might remember that earlier this year, I wrote that I had read my first Christie mystery.  It was one of her later books and was not considered one of her better works.  "And Then There Were None", however, is among her most famous mysteries.  I'll see if my opinion of her writings improves.

In the months leading up to my move to Mexico, on each trip down here I would bring some books that I had not read.  I now have several dozen books on my bookshelves, probably a few years' worth of reading material.  And now I have some more books to add to the shelf.