better citizens

“In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the easter edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become ‘better citizens.’ He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo’s beautiful novella Pedro Paramo, Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe.”

in James Wood, How Fiction Works