One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez — The foundational Colombian novel doesn't take place in Bogota, but it is impossible to understand the country without it. The fictional Macondo and its cycles of history, magic, and forgetting are as Colombian as the city itself.
The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara — Guevara passed through Colombia on his formative 1952 journey across South America. His observations on the country's inequality and political violence remain startlingly relevant.
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez — Non-fiction from the same author, reconstructing the 1990 kidnapping of ten journalists by Pablo Escobar's cartel. One of the clearest accounts of what Bogota and Colombia were living through at the height of the narco wars.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar by Virginia Vallejo — The memoir of the Colombian journalist who was Pablo Escobar's mistress during the height of his power. A vivid and unsettling account of the world he inhabited and the city he terrorised.
Fruits of Paradise: Travels in Central and Northern South America by William Henry Hudson — A 19th-century travel narrative that covers Colombia before the modern era, written with the naturalist's eye that shaped much of Hudson's work.