One Hundred Years of Solitude / Cien Años de Soledad. Breathtaking in Spanish, beautiful in English. A mythic journey through so many volumes of collective human pain and love and life and death. The first time I read it (in English), it was extremely difficult to track all the characters, but the effort was worth it to be immersed in such a full, rich portrait of a family. The payoff of the final pages made me appreciate writing and storytelling anew.

There are so many iconic moments: a woman so beautiful that she’s not of this Earth simply floats into the sky one day; a man haunted to madness by the ghost of the man he killed is tied to a tree; incest babies have pig tails; the banana massacre. The book defined a genre with its magical yet realistic style, and it tells the history of a century on a very personal level. Really enjoyable read, every time.