Mexico City rewards reading before, during, and after the trip. A short shelf of the essentials.
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Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear (1958) — the novel that put modern Mexico City literature on the map: an angry, polyphonic portrait of a class-divided post-revolutionary capital. The translation is slightly heavy; the city Fuentes knew is largely gone, but his sense of the place's contradictions is permanent.
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Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) — not a novel but a long essay on Mexican identity. Paz writes about masks, fiestas, the Day of the Dead, and the conquest as continuing trauma. If you read one book to understand why Mexico City feels the way it does, this is it.
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Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (1998) — the Chilean novelist set the first part of his masterpiece in 1970s Mexico City, where he lived as a young poet. Reads like a love letter to bars, cheap rooms, and walking the Roma at 3 am.
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Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo (2018) — a chronicle of present-day Mexico City: traffic, seismicity, food, language, neighbourhoods. The single best contemporary book about the place.
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Salvador Novo, Nueva grandeza mexicana (1946) — if you read Spanish, the great chronicler of the city's mid-century moment. A series of essays on Mexico City's neighbourhoods that influenced every chronicler who came after.