Reading Your Way Through Mexico: A Handful of Novels and Memoirs to Take You Beyond the Guidebook

If reading comes almost as naturally to you as breathing, you're sure to pack a paperback when you go traveling. On my first trip to Mexico, I toted a used copy of Gone with the Wind, an excellent choice thick enough to entertain me nights during my three traveling weeks. After a day of navigating new surroundings with my paltry Spanish, I was happy to look over Scarlett's shoulder at a soldier's ball more than a century earlier in the American south.

Now that I live in Mexico, what do I read? Am I still an escape artist, leaving my immediate surroundings behind with the latest dog-eared treasure I've found at the English language library? Yes, sometimes I am, but I've also found Mexican writers I like, whether I read them in English or Spanish.

Before I moved, I had already read Carlos' Fuentes collection of stories, The Crystal Frontier, at the branch library across from my apartment in Portland, Oregon. It was like tasting nearly a dozen slices from a telenovela (television soap opera). Fuentes set some stories in the U.S., others in Mexico. I still remember a comical one about a jaded Mexican lecturer talking about his country's food to an American audience that just didn't get it. Then there was a tragic romance conducted through gestures between a Mexican window washer and a young Anglo woman watching him from her office.

Another story satirized a rich Mexican woman who treat a male servant like an animal in front of her friends, and another about featured a promiscuous Mexican man near the frontier who even deceives a girl friend about his cell telephone, among others. The book is available in Spanish as La frontera de crystal. [In Mexico, only the first word of a book title appears in caps].

Next on my list is the soft crime writer, Paco Taibo II, whose translated soft detective stories set in the Mexico City of the 1970s are long on interlocking plots, flirtations with young teenaged girls, and a permanent love affair with his sweetheart with a pony tail. Reading the original Spanish versions will pump up your confidence with the language.

Travel writer Tony Cohan has written two entertaining books, On Mexican Time about his life in San Miguel de Allende (1980s) and Mexican Days, recounting travels to nine other cities around the country (much more recent). His vivid descriptions will bring back memories or tempt you to branch out.

Besides Fuentes, I like a Mexican writer with a much longer last name, Jorge Ibarguengoitia, who was a very funny man. You'll find plenty to keep you glued to the page in books like Las ruinas que ves, a farce set in Guanajuato about 1950 or Las Muertas (translated in English as The Dead Girls.

For an annotated list of non-fiction books about Mexico, Lonely Planet's guide makes a good starting point.