Anyway, a friend of mine recommended this book and she said it is one of her favorites. She's an English teacher so I always ask her for new ideas on what to read. I've heard good things about it so I hope it's a good one. And I hope you haven't already read it...I did just see that it was on Oprah's book club list (for any Oprah fans out there - Me, not so much :)) The author is a pretty famous Latin American author so maybe you've read something by him. Enjoy!
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism.
I just had to post this review because it was everywhere I was reading about the book and I thought it was interesting -
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man...Mr. Garcia Marquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
