One Hundred Years of Solitude

This Valentines Day, I want to showcase a book that I truly love - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I read this novel in HS and instantly fell in love with the characters and the use of magical realism to tell a very moving and complex story.

There is a joke that it takes 100 years to read this novel and that is mainly due to the length and the huge number of characters with the same/similar names. However, I found the seven generations of the Buendía family to be extremely interesting and I really enjoyed their learning about their lives.

While this is not a particularly happy story, it does shows how generational decisions/mistakes can pile up and influence future generations and can even lead to their doom. This story is beautifully written and it may be one of the best works of Latin American literature.

If you are able to keep up with the large ensemble of characters and can follow along with a complex thread of magical realism, modernism, and avant- guard ideals..then I highly recommend you check this out because you will love it.