There’s still time to go to the bookstore

My youngest granddaughter, Isabel, is already 12 years old, but I wanted to extend the pleasure of reading with a child and, on Sunday, I read to her the book by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, “The Blind Eyes of Mad Horses”. Beautiful book of memories of the writer’s childhood in his hometown, Araraquara, which recounts his relationship with his grandfather José. During a visit to her grandchildren earlier this year, Isabel was bedridden and had to read a book as part of a school assignment. Then we read “The Adventures of Robin Hood” together, by Ana Maria Machado and Rodrigo Machado. Beautiful recreation of the classic. In fact, Ana Maria was Jabuti’s Literary Personality of the Year. Her books for adults and children will always be a great choice.

A good gift is the trilogy “The Darkest Place”, by Milton Hatoum. If the person receiving the gift has already read the first two books in the series, which takes place during the dictatorship, give him the recently released latest “Dance of Errors”, in which the author stays in Martin’s story, but from the point of view of his mother, Lina. I was late with this reading, so I read the first two this year, “The Night of Waiting” and “Vanishing Points” and started with the last one. Itamar Vieira Junior has just released the third volume of the Earth trilogy. “Heart Without Fear”, the powerful story of Rita Preta, a single mother who sees her eldest son disappear after a police operation.

• Itamar Vieira Junior: “The first step to finding hope is to look directly at our history”

Writer Sueli Carneiro won the Juca Pato Prize in 2025. The Brazilian Union of Writers (UBE) awards the prize for her body of work, but also for a relevant book published the previous year. In the case of Sueli, it was the work “Lélia González: a portrait”. The author paints a portrait of the great sociologist, activist of the black movement, who had an impressive personal journey and became an intellectual who had a profound impact on contemporary Brazilian thought.

A great gift is “The Office Observer,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, reissued late last year. These are extracts from a diary that he kept for 34 years, from 1943 to 1977. Whoever reads it has the feeling of living with the poet. Another reissue that deserves to be placed on the Christmas tree is the historic “Cidade parte”, by Zuenir Ventura, which celebrated its 30th anniversary. And if the person receiving the gift loved the movie “I’m Still Here” but doesn’t have the book, it’s definitely worth it. The film does not exhaust the strong and sensitive work of Marcelo Rubens Paiva. One book I will always recommend is Marina Colasanti’s delicate “The War of My Other People,” one of the painful losses of 2025.

Ruy Castro won the Jabuti for Book of the Year with “O Ouvidor do Brasil,” a collection of chronicles about Tom Jobim, edited to become a beautiful profile of the composer and conductor. Ruy also released the important “Trincheira Tropical,” a completely new look at World War II, depicting the battle fought in Rio de Janeiro.

During the year I read or reread many books to prepare for the speech at the Brazilian Academy of Letters. My president has ten predecessors and the boss is Castro Alves. I was immersed for months in reading these authors, including Dinah Silveira de Queiroz and Euclides da Cunha, or in revisiting the Bahian poet with a short life and immense legacy. I recommend here a book by my immediate predecessor, the great Cacá Diegues. In “Vida de cinema”, Cacá goes from his childhood in Alagoas to the backstage of Cinema Novo. We learn a lot about this revolutionary explosion of creativity in Brazilian cinema.