“Let others boast of the books they have been given to write; I boast of those that I was given to read… I wish this library to be as diverse as the unsatisfied curiosity that has led me, and continues to lead me, to the exploration of so many languages and so many literatures.”
So begins the Biblioteca Personal of Jorge Luis Borges, a 1985 project commissioned by Argentine publisher Hyspamerica that asked the Buenos Aires-born writer to curate and compose prologues for 100 great works of literature. Though he only made it through 74 titles before dying of liver cancer the following year, Borges’ selections showcase a lifetime of inquisitive and disparate tastes.
Including Kafka classics alongside ancient religious texts, obscure philosophical works, Greek mythology, and the prose of Edgar Allan Poe, the collection is a treasure trove into the literary memory of a writer who revolutionized Latin American fiction. Explore Borges’ generous list below, and complement with the favorite books of Gabriel García Márquez, Paulo Coelho and Ernest Hemingway.
Jorge Luis Borges’ Reading List
Stories by Julio Cortázar
Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
The Mandarin And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
The Counterfeiters by André Gide
The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The Greek Myths by Robert Graves (also rec’d by Christopher Hitchens)
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
“Benito Cereno”, “Billy Budd”, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville
“The Tragic Everyday”, “The Blind Pilot”, and “Words and Blood” by Giovanni Papini
The Three Impostors by Arthur Manchen
Song of Songs by Fray Luis de León
An Explanation of the Book of Job by Fray Luis de León
The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (also rec’d by Leonard Cohen & Patti Smith)
Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
The Travels by Marco Polo
Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob
Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candida by George Bernard Shaw
Marcus Brutus and The Hour of All Men by Francisco de Quevedo
The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
“Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo
Tales by Rudyard Kipling
Vathek by William Beckford
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Professional Secrets & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
Arabian Nights: Tales From The Thousand and One Nights (also rec’d by Gabriel García Márquez)
The New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
Salvation Through the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
Confabulario by Juan José Arreola
Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
Complete Poetry by William Blake (also rec’d by Jim Morrison)
Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (also rec’d by Stevie Nicks)
The Aeneid by Virgil
Stories by Voltaire
An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
The Varieties of Religious Experience: The Study of Human Nature by William James
Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn
(via Open Culture)