One Hundred Years of Solitude

I read this book for a miniature book club, and that is the only reason I continued past the first two chapters — and while there was a run of chapters and characters in the second half of the book that I really enjoyed, and therefore I'm glad that I read it, overall it is just not my style.

For the pros it definitely makes for a great in-depth discussion piece, sometimes the flowery language serves the story well, and there are certain characters (mainly Remedios the Beauty and Meme) that are genuinely intriguing and entertaining.

The cons however include the fact that the pacing is extremely choppy and bizarre — to the point of being introduced to a character in one paragraph, they get married at the end of the paragraph, and then half a page later they're dead. You really never get a chance to spend much time with each character, and they generally don't act like human beings in any sense of the word (a “highlight” of this bizzare behavior that sticks out to me was when one of the characters is eating dirt, throws up green liquid and leeches, sees her brother laying in a hammock and is overcome with the need to have sex with him, and then they break off her previous engagement to marry each other in the next paragraph).

As a person who likes to connect with characters, the format and style of this narrative felt so remote and unengaging most of the time unfortunately, and even though the process led to great discussion with my reading partner I think it is a major issue for the book that I would never have continued reading it on my own.