See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Venezuela.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Dragons in the Waters | Madeleine L’Engle | 4,810 | 1,393 |
| Green Mansions | William Henry Hudson | 3,251 | 1,811 |
| Doña Bárbara | Rómulo Gallegos | 5,804 | 517 |
| It Would Be Night in Caracas | Karina Sainz Borgo | 7,368 | 241 |
| The Sun and the Void | Gabriela Romero Lacruz | 3,699 | 408 |
| In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon | Redmond O’Hanlon | 1,558 | 638 |
| Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People | Napoleon A. Chagnon | 1,327 | 705 |
| The Caiman | Maria Eugenia Manrique | 2,393 | 120 |
This table sees one of the biggest variations between LibraryThing and Goodreads that I have yet seen. The top-ranked book on LibraryThing is fifth on Goodreads; the top-ranked book on Goodreads is seventh on LibraryThing; the winner on aggregate is second on one system and third on the other. Even bigger divergences would have appeared if I had gone further down the table.
And of all my childhood favourites, I did not expect to see Madeleine L’Engle, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, winning this week’s prize. But indeed, Dragons in the Waters is about a kid going to Venezuela to take over his inheritance, both natural and supernatural.
Venezuelan writers pick up half of the spots this week. Surprisingly, only It Would Be Night in Caracas is directly about the current political situation.
Of the others, The Sun and the Void is set in a fantasy country that as far as I can tell the author wants us to read as Venezuela. The Ya̦nomamö live in both Venezuela and Brazil, but Venezuela has adopted Chagnon’s book, so I’m happy to go along with that.
I disqualified seven books. A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende, is mainly set in Spain and Chile, and only in Venezuela at the end. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about the end of the life of Simon Bolivar, in what is now Colombia. Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, is about the entire continent. Bruchko, by Bruce Olson, unpleasantly straddles the border with Colombia but seems to be more on the other side. When Time Stopped, by Ariana Neumann, is about a Venezuelan discovering her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana, covers Simon Bolivar’s life and career all over the region. And Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, by Margarita Engle, sounds very sweet but is set mainly in the USA.
Coming next: Niger, Australia, North Korea and Syria.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine