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Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s lawyers appear to have been reading up on the country\u2019s penal code and have found a way to help their client reduce the 27-year prison sentence<\/a> he received last year for plotting a coup: reading books.<\/p>\n There is only one problem: the former far-right Brazilian president has never been known as a bibliophile.<\/p>\n \u201cSorry, I don\u2019t have time to read,\u201d Bolsonaro once declared. \u201cIt\u2019s been three years since I read a book.\u201d<\/p>\n Brazilian law contains a literary device through which book-reading inmates can cut their sentences by four days for each title read. On Thursday, a supreme court judge authorised the disgraced former president to take part in the scheme after a request from his legal team.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper famed for his hostility to democracy, minorities, the Amazon rainforest and the arts, is unlikely to appreciate the approved reading list.<\/p>\n It includes Brazilian works on Indigenous rights, racism, the environment and the violence meted out by the country\u2019s 1964-85 dictatorship \u2013 a regime Bolsonaro openly supported.<\/p>\n One title, Ana Maria Gon\u00e7alves\u2019 950-page Um Defeito de Cor (A Colour Defect), tells \u201cthe history of Brazil \u2026 from the point of view of a Black woman\u201d.<\/p>\n Also featured is, Democracy<\/a><\/em>!<\/a>, an age-appropriate non-fiction picture book by the English-born author-illustrator Philip Bunting.<\/p>\n Some of the books on the list, such as Leo Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace and Miguel de Cervantes\u2019 Don Quixote, are more than 1,000 pages long.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro did once appear in public with a similarly-sized tome: Winston Churchill\u2019s 1,000-plus page Memoirs of the Second World War but it is unclear if the former president read it.<\/p>\n In order to benefit from the sentence reduction scheme, prisoners must prove they have actually read the books by submitting written reports to prison authorities.<\/p>\n Asked to name his favourite book during the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro plumped for one by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra<\/a>, a notorious army colonel accused of torturing hundreds of prisoners during the dictatorship. \u201cIt\u2019s a real story about Brazil \u2026 with facts, with data, with places with real episodes,\u201d enthused Bolsonaro who was this week transferred to a maximum security prison<\/a> in the capital, Bras\u00edlia, after spending Christmas imprisoned at a federal police base.<\/p>\n