Lately, I’ve been on a quest to upgrade the quality of my reading material. Sure, I still consume at least three pop fiction novels per week (I buy them by the lot to save money). But at some point last year I began to suspect that, despite my immense enjoyment, a regular literary diet of suspense/thrillers was probably rotting my brain.

After reading somewhere that author William Kennedy praised One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”, I decided that I shouldn’t miss out.

I could not possibly agree less with Kennedy. It’s not the author’s sense of the absurd which bothered me; I’m actually a fan of “magical realism” in literature. It appeals to my existentialist side.

I even appreciated, to some extent, the circularity within the novel’s structure, the most obvious of which was the getting and begetting of so many characters named Arcadio or Aureliano that I could no longer keep them straight. After all, the author emphasizes this theme through the women in the book who repeatedly observe that time wasn’t really passing, nor were lives really changing: they were merely repeating the same thing, day after day, wearing themselves out.

But, frankly, I found nothing in the book with which to connect. Sentences rambled so tangentially they often never conveyed anything at all. Paragraphs became pages. Words, at times, seemed randomly strung together. And throughout all of it I found all of the characters so dry and inconceivable (in the sense that, due to the naming confusion, I couldn’t picture a single damn one of them) that their births, deaths and tragi-comedies left me completely and utterly unmoved.

When I’d first mentioned that I was reading this book, Craig commented that “the last paragraph… is one of the best in literature”. I agree, but probably not for the same reason.

After having spent 21 nights of misery reading this book (because I’m too stubborn to quit reading any book, no matter how much I despise it), I loved that last paragraph, too… if only because it meant I was finally done with the damned thing.