(Special for the Hispanic Heritage Month)

This year truly became a breakout year for me in my progress in Spanish. One of the most important parts of it was the unbelievable amount of great Hispanic books I discovered, books that made me grateful to read them in original. Some of them deserve a special spotlight in their very special month. As I only recently started to get to know the literary Hispanic world, almost all of them are very common and well-known classics that absolutely gained their fame. Some of them left the deepest trace in my heart.

1. "En Agosto Nos Vemos", Gabriel García Márquez

The very first book in Spanish I have read in my life and that I will never forget. It is brief, melancholic and ascetic, and it holds the deepest attention for details, feelings and emotions. Just as I began to read the first page I could already feel the heat of a summer island on my skin, the sultry smell of tropical flowers and the bitterness of the end of the summer.

2. "Pedro Páramo", Juan Rulfo

There are books that one cannot physically swallow in one day because of how heavy and mind-bending they feel. "Pedro Páramo" is a perfect example of a story that breaks all the stereotypes and conventions, twists the narrative modes in an absurd, surrealistic and emotional story of love, death, generations and memory. If at the beginning I felt slightly intimidated by the amount of tension the author put in his prose, then I learnt to love his dense and simultaneously minimalistic prose that tell us more with its silence than words.

3. "Ficciones", Jorge Luis Borges

Even those people who are extremely far from the world of the literature have heard the name of Borges at least once, and every single piece of post-modernist phantasmal books of the late 20th and the early 21th century carry an inevitable flair of his influence. I would give anything to reread "Fictions" for the first time again - it is a kind of book that puzzles, confuses, tricks you in the most mind-bending labyrinths that only become more intricate and complex with time. It was exactly Borges who made it clear for me that metafiction was my most preferrable literary genre and that I would never skip anything written by him.

4. "Todos los fuegos el fuego", Julio Cortázar

Unlike Borges, whose fiction is generally loved by almost everyone, Cortázar's short stories have a more complex character of writing and narration and are often underrated. I personally felt challenged by some of his later story collections, struggling to connect the narration into a coherent one with my limited Spanish knowledge. Yet, "Todos los fuegos el fuego" appeared for me as a perfect balance between an intelligent, flowering prose, haunting and sometimes more than absurd narrative and amazing ability of the author to discuss real acute problems with help of surreal and fantastical plots. I swallowed all of the book in no time, and until now, the only book of Cortázar that could match that unforgettable feeling would be "Final del juego", another puzzle of masterpiece.