100 Years of Reading This Book

I've been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, One Hundred Years of Solitude for about two months now. I put it down for a while and read Water For Elephants (very good), but now I'm back to it. I stopped reading it because I just needed a break. It is a book about everything and nothing. It is so incredibly random yet strangely entertaining. I read a full page and then have to reread it because I have no idea what just happened. It's weird. It's endearing. It's annoying! You may wonder, then, why on earth I continue to read it. I thought about this today, and here's what I came up with:

1. I don't like not finishing a book. Those of you who know me well know that I have an obsessive compulsive evenness issue. I need symmetry. Reading half of a book is not symmetrical. It's uneven and terrible and cannot be tolerated.

2. It's a challenge. This is a book that won the Nobel Prize. I don't know why, but I keep thinking if I finish it I might have a better idea.

3. It's my book club book. I have a two person book club that basically started when my friend and colleague Joseph and I discovered we were reading the same book. Hence, our book club was born. We don't have meetings, and we don't discuss the books all that much. We simply decide what we'll read and read it. And I always take at least two months longer to read the book than Joseph. Regardless, I feel a responsibility to finish for the sake of our Not So Real Book Club. Plus, Joseph thought the book was completely crazy, too, but says the ending was worth reading it. He may be lying, but I need to find out.

4. I read another Marquez book, Love in the Time of Cholera, in my AP English class senior year, and I remember loving it. I couldn't tell you one thing about it, but I do remember I really liked it.

5. Finally, the book can be downright entertaining while frustrating the heck out of you. Seriously, I don't know what really is happening (not your typical plot line here), yet I find myself chuckling inside a lot. I just opened up the book and pointed to a random passage and this is what I got: "When they thought of the desperate measure of seasoning him with pepper, cumin seeds, and laurel leaves and boiling him for a whole day over a slow fire, he had already begun to decompose and they had to bury him hastily." I know from teaching a Marquez story to my Honors class that his style is called Magical Realism. It is weird, no doubt, but cool because the strangest things happen yet the way it's told you believe it.

I am finally more than halfway through and have 180 pages to go. I hope to finish by Thanksgiving! Then I can get started on the next book club book that I imagine Joseph has already finished. Sigh...