world: honduras | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Honduras.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Lost City of the Monkey God	Douglas Preston	62,615	2,338
The Codex	Douglas Preston	21,153	2,221
The Mosquito Coast	Paul Theroux	13,895	2,413
Miss Quinces	Kat Fajardo	3,856	291
Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure	Christopher S. Stewart	1,580	218
Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo	Elvia Alvarado	642	221
The Summer We Came to Life	Deborah Cloyed	763	86
The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough	Katie Smith Milway	246	174

This week’s winner, The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston, is a non-fiction book about archaeologists investigating the legendary lost White City, Ciudad Blanca, in the Honduran jungle. The Codex, by the same author, takes the same scenario but recasts it as a thriller.

The Mosquito Coast, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is about an American who decides to move his family to Honduras to escape the modern world, with disastrous consequences; it has been adapted for both film and television.

Most of these books are about Americans encountering Honduras. The only Honduran writer on the list is Elvia Alvarado. (One of Kat Fajardo’s parents is Honduran, but she herself was born and brought up in New York.) Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringos is non-fiction; the top novel that I found by a Honduran writer set in Honduras is Libertad, by Bessie Flores Zaldivar.

I disqualified more than twenty books. Most of them were about Hondurans in, or trying to get into, the United States. Some are by authors who have a link to Honduras but set their work elsewhere, most notably Augusto Monterroso, who was born in Tegucigalpa, but moved to Guatemala when he was 15, and did most of his best known work there and in Mexico.

This series is going to take a break for the next couple of weeks, as I will concentrate on Doctor Who posts at the beginning of February. After that, the next country is Cuba, which will be our last American jurisdiction for a while; after that come Tajikistan, Papua New Guinea, and a run of Europeans starting with Sweden.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: world: honduras

The best known books set in each country: Honduras