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Outside two world wars and the protracted Cold War, what most defined 20th century geopolitics were two competing global projects: imperialism and anti-colonialism. Totalitarian rulers embraced both banners, launching wars of aggression that crushed the ambitions of free peoples and those yearning to be free. Today, those malignant projects are back, once again setting the world aflame. Extinguishing the fires will take both might and moral clarity. It will also require the radical left to admit it’s been radically wrong. The free world will have to tack right to win.  

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The narrator, also named Juan Gabriel Vásquez, becomes involved with a strange man obsessed with conspiracy theories about the assassination of a popular left-leaning politician, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in 1948. Set in modern-day Colombia, the novel has a book-within-a-book, a detour from the main story line, to a different murder: the killing in 1914 of General Rafael Uribe.  WHY I’M LOVING IT: References to real historical events, with supposedly authentic documents, appeals to me. The fuzzy illustrations in the paperback edition encourage belief in vagu...