A story I’m work­ing on for Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine has dragged me deep into the his­tory of Che Guevara’s dis­as­trous final guer­rilla cam­paign in Bolivia in 1967, and in the process I’ve started to col­lect a small pile of fas­ci­nat­ing items that aren’t going to make it into the piece (which touches on Che only incidentally).

One of these is the read­ing list that Che kept in the back of his Boli­vian diary. I dis­cov­ered the list after read­ing the work of the his­to­rian and jour­nal­ist Carlos Soria, whom I met in La Paz a couple of weeks ago. Soria has the whole cat­a­log of 106 books at his ter­rific Che in Bolivia site, along with some useful com­men­tary in Spanish.

Among other things he tells us that when he vis­ited Havana in 2003, he met with Harry Vil­le­gas, one of the three Cuban guer­rilleros who sur­vived the rout at La Higuera. Soria asked Vil­le­gas if they’d really car­ried all those books during the cam­paign, when food and water and ammu­ni­tion would seem much more pru­dent uses of their strength. “Man does not live by bread alone, chico,” Vil­le­gas told him.

As you’d expect, the list con­tains a lot of books about Bolivia in par­tic­u­lar, Latin Amer­ica in gen­eral, Marx­ist theory, state pol­i­tics, and the art of war. But here are some of the more sur­pris­ing titles that caught my eye:

Luis Forie – Her­a­cli­tus, Expo­si­tion and Frag­ments
Aris­to­tle – Logic
José Gaos – Philo­soph­i­cal Anthol­ogy (Greek Phi­los­o­phy)
García Bacca – The Pre­so­crat­ics. Philo­soph­i­cal Frag­ments of the Pre­so­crat­ics
Lucretius – The Nature of Things
Abucha­far Abento­fail – The Auto­di­dac­tic Philoso­pher
Gior­dano Bruno – On Cause, Prin­ci­ple, and Unity
Morris West – The Ambas­sador
Graham Greene – Stam­boul Train
William Faulkner – The Town
Sven Hassel – Legion of the Damned
García Lorca – The Gypsy Bal­lads
Rubén Darío – Songs of Life and Hope
Ramón Del Valle-Inclán – The Lamp of Mar­vels
Israel Mat­tuck – The Thought of the Prophets
Stend­hal – The Char­ter­house of Parma
Pas­cual Jordan – Physics of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury
Nazim Hikmet – Life is Beau­ti­ful, Brother
Dos­toyevsky – The Insulted and Humil­i­ated
Sur­gi­cal Clin­ics of the United States – Bio­log­i­cal Fun­da­men­tals of Surgery
Sur­gi­cal Clin­ics of the United States – Anes­the­sia
Julio Cortázar – All Fires the Fire
Fer­di­nand Lund­berg – America’s Sixty Fam­i­lies
Eras­mus – The Praise of Folly