I've finished reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez in Spanish. I recommend it (in translation if you must). It's quite short--little more than 100 pages.
Reading a book in a second language is like unwrapping a present on Christmas morning. Very very slowly...bashing it open forcefully with a dictionary. Or, if you're Forrest Gump, it's like putting an unknown chocolate in one's mouth. There are surprises, and they're even more thrilling because of the work one must put in to understand what's happening. My favorite little gift of a passage so far:
Magdalena Oliver had come with him on the ship and could not get rid of the image. "He looked gay," she told me. "And it was a shame because I wanted to smear him with butter and eat him up alive." She was not the only one to think it, nor the last to realize that Bayardo San Román was not a man one could know at first sight.Incidentally, it appears that Spanish has at least a half dozen words for "dawn," and I like it. Also for "fear."
I suspended disbelief while I was reading it, but now I don't have to anymore. I must point out that the entire plot of the book hinges on a few facts:
1. All women have hymens.
2. A woman without a hymen is not a virgin.
3. Bloody sheets or it didn't happen.
Fuck virginity. But it was still a good book.
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