One Hundred Years of Solitude

So many book covers to choose from, designing these must be challenging.

I'm in such a daze from reading this haha. For the majority of the book I've been confused by the irregular order of transpiring events and the repetition of names for different characters. It's only until the last few pages did I realize the greatness of the storytelling. Well played, well played.

The genre of the book is magic realism, so a major theme is obviously the contrast, or in this case lack of contrast, between fantasy and reality. There's also the intermixing of past/present/future through either loss or over-vivid memories.

Melquíades had not put events in the order of a man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.

What did you expect?’ he [José Arcadio Segundo] murmured. ‘Time passes.’ ‘That’s how it goes,’ Úrsula said, ‘but not so much.’ When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. 

Will do a second reading of this book someday to fully appreciate it's intricacies. But gots to move onto other titles on the summer reading list.