One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* * * * *

I would like to talk about this work sometime when I feel capable of it. For now, I’ll repeat what I said in a cathartic, fuzzy ecstasy when my wife finished the last words.

“Shit. That’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in my life.”

I don’t swear, really. I felt like I was vomiting something sweet like bread.

If you don’t read this book before you die, I will think you missed out on something integral to modern existence.

Strange Pilgrims

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* * *
Content 4/5
Poetic Mastery 4/5
Literary Truth 3/5

A collection of short stories that cohere around the theme of Latin Americans displaced in Europe, Strange Pilgrims offers 12 ejoyable tales of aging, supersitition, childhood, adolescence, pilgrimage, human nature, and the difference between Latin America’s people and and Europe’s people. A few stories were clearly written in Garcia Marquez’s famed style “magical realism.”

This book was the inagural selection for our book “club” cleverly called Book Talk. While enjoyable to read, somehow this collection lacked impact for me. My favorite moments in the work were the enviably vital relationships of the characters in “The Saint” and the horrific drama of “‘I Only Came to Use the Phone.'”