Michener and Hemingway… After reading Iberia and For Whom the Bell Tolls, I very much wanted to live in Spain one day. Michener’s Mexico is quite excellent for showing how Mexico evolved… an some bullfighting stories there, too. If one is a Hemingway fan, Death in the Afternoon (much earlier) is also somewhat mandatory on this topic. I was inspired to do a few paintings of bulls afterwards. (Here is one I used to illustrated a blog story: https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2008/04/this-is-no-bull.html
fwiw