That Feeling of the First Time...

Unbelievably, I'm reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time ever.  This book has been assigned for me to read in at least 2-3 classes before now, but I've always started the book and not ever really made it past what appears to be page 50 or so since that was the only part I remembered as I started reading it again last week.  I can't believe I chose to be a slacker on such an amazing book, although in my defense, the Spanish vocabulary list tucked in the back from 10 -- yes, 10 -- years ago when it was first assigned during a study abroad class in Seville, Spain explains why I didn't make it very far.  The vocabulary is dense and even more difficult if you've been learning Castellano since  even the most common words, like jars, is perplexing as the term I knew as "jarros" in Spain becomes "frascos" in the book's Latin American Spanish.  

In many ways, I'm happy that I haven't read the book until now because I am able to savor every page right now in a way that wasn't possible in years past.  This book is an amazing narrative of time, family, history, nationality, and even gender.  More than all of these themes, though, it is persistent meditation on solitude and loneliness.  

Taking literature on as a career has loads of benefits, but there is also a major risk that taking it on as a career means that reading becomes a work project with a goal toward interpretation and if one isn't always on guard against influencing the text in such a goal-oriented way, the very meaning that makes the work of literature incredible is sucked out of the process of reading.

I'm thinking a lot about this book because it is also rare to have a 500 page text to read in the semester.  Texts like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Middlemarch, or In Search of Lost Time are relegated to comprehensive exams and PhD qualifying exams rather than approached in the confines of a semester because there often isn't enough time or freedom within the constraints of a semester to bring these books to bear in the classroom in a meaningful way.  Lucky for me, the professor of my final class in the master's program is ambitious and willing  to assign this text and assume that everyone will complete the reading.  Although it would be crass for me to suggest that I can't possibly understand how someone could start this book and not finish it...now that I'm past page 50 and a more avid reader than I was as an undergraduate, I wouldn't dare put this book down before finishing it to the very end.

I'm savoring every moment of it.