The best known books set in each country: Brazil revisited

See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, but that still leaves four countries from before I changed the system where I have recorded fewer than five books actually set in that country: Brazil, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia. So to make redress, I’m revisiting these earlier posts with an updated table.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
State of WonderAnn Patchett193,4936,374
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the AmazonDavid Grann101,2445,139
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest JourneyCandice Millard 70,9083,669
The Seven SistersLucinda Riley152,6281,360
Pedagogy of the OppressedPaulo Freire36,0644,436
The Hour of the StarClarice Lispector 40,2612,202
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás CubasMachado de Assis33,4962,582
My Sweet-Orange TreeJosé Mauro de Vasconcelos73,3411,013

As noted in my previous entry, I am disqualifying a bunch of Paolo Coelho books: The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.) Also John Grisham’s The Testament seems to be more than 50% set in America from an unscientific survey.

As also previously noted, nine of the eleven (long) chapters of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder are set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett. The River of Doubt is also about a journey through the rain forest. A bit of a theme here…

I did not disqualify any others than those mentioned before. The next six books on the table all seemed to be reasonably set in Brazil. The one edge case is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is a teacher training textbook, but it very explicitly draws on his experience of teaching in Brazil so I’m inclined to let it through. Freire is the top Brazilian writer on the list; the top novel by a Brazilian is nineteenth century classic The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas aka Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.

Next in reparation: Bangladesh.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan