Outside Reading - Week 7, Post B

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I really enjoyed reading this novel for a few reasons. First of all, I liked that is was set in another culture. I learned a lot about the people of the South American culture, and how their way of life changed in the past one hundred years. Next of all, I liked the format. Originally, all of the different characters and family trees confused me. After I got the hang of it, I liked how the different stories were based on different characters, and the stories had nothing in common but the characters they revolved around were related and all part of the same family. The other thing that I liked about the format were that the stories never really followed an entire plot, but were all sort of separate instances. I think that this gave me a better understanding of the characters and their habits and how they affect the people around them. By not following a major plot, this gives me something else to focus on instead of the plot, which was the characters. I think the lesson of this novel is to be aware of who is around you and how you influence them, and I saw this more clearly by viewing the plain everyday non-major events in all of the different people's intertwining lives, but not activities. The final reason that I enjoyed reading this novel was that it was very interesting. I was always into the short story that I was reading about.