Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - this was a book club pick, and sounded interesting, but after having read it I'm still not sure whether I really "liked" it or not. I didn't hate it though! Our original thought in choosing this book for our club read was that we could watch the movie together after we'd discussed the book - however, after discussing it with one of the readers that had seen the movie, I will skip the movie as she didn't give it a very good review at all. The book is about a young man, Florentino Ariza that "falls passionately in love" with Fermina Daza and what happens down through the years as she rejects him, chooses to marry someone else, and he marks time until she is free again. It sounds like a tragic romance, but I was not at all impressed with Florentino Ariza. While he is supposed to remain hopelessly in love with Fermina Daza, and is waiting only for her through the 50-plus years until her husband dies, he engages in 622 affairs and some of them quite perverse. It is hard to believe that even the most amoral character could fervently believe himself to be completely true and faithful to someone while engaging in so many illicit affairs.
At the beginning of the book I was somewhat confused by the fact that the main character, Florentino Ariza, is not even mentioned until almost the end of the first chapter. Another purely practical (for me) reason that I had trouble finishing this book in a timely manner was that the chapters were very long, without logical "bookmark points" within. For someone who sits down with a book for hours at a time and reads until they finish it, this wouldn't present a problem, but these days I do most of my reading in short chunks of time so I tended to neglect this book until I knew I would have at least half an hour uninterrupted to get through it. And since wasn't entirely engaged with the characters I wasn' very motivated either. Marquez's unique and lyrical descriptions of settings and emotions did keep me coming back for more, and moments of irony and dry understatement were appealing, but in the end the whole story left me feeling rather flat.