2015 Reading Update

In April I finally finished reading Love in the Time of Cholera, thus completing my March item from the 2015 Reading Challenge: "a book that was originally written in another language." I loved this book. It is extremely dense (hence the few extra weeks it took me to finish the book), but I was (and still am) in awe of the narrative scope. Gabriel Garcia Marquez achieves something at which many writers would fail, unveiling a lifelong love story with complex characterization, hilarious encounters, profound realizations, and rich, unencumbered detail. It was amazing; a page could contain multitudes. A seemingly major plot element could be revealed and resolved within a single sentence or paragraph. You could miss whole love affairs if you stopped paying attention for a moment.

These are my most bookmark-worthy favorite lines:

She awoke long before dawn and lay exhausted and wakeful, with her eyes closed, thinking of the countless years she still had to live. (p.137)

No: he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key. (p.192)

All at once, in the large mirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the looking glass. (p. 228)

Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves. (p. 287)

Unperturbed, he took off his eyeglasses with a characteristic gesture, he flooded her with the transparent waters of his childlike eyes, and in a single phrase he burdened her with the weight of his unbearable wisdom: "Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability." With the first loneliness of her widowhood she had understood that the phrase did not conceal the miserable threat that she had attributed to it so many times, but was the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours. (p. 300)

Maybe I'll tackle One Hundred Years of Solitude sometime now that I've got my first GGM novel behind me (and well worth the time indeed).

Coming soon, since I'm behind on blogging -- a discussion on my May choice, "a book from your childhood." And, okay, I couldn't resist taking this opportunity to re-read one of my favorite series as a kid, and it did not disappoint.

What are you reading this month??