Bombard me with suggestions now please thanks.

and it was better than the first 30 pages suggested (which I had to read three times before getting past them), and I would read it again, but I had a few issues with it.

Besides having to wade through the self-indulgence of excessively dense and unrelated descriptive passages every second page, ultimately I wouldn’t dispute that it’s well-written, but it was what was being well-written that I constantly had a problem with and found myself always coming up against; the way love and sex and relationships were depicted as inextricably interwined, and how one side of the events (that following Florentino Ariza) was based on the premises that 1. no differention between love and sex can or needs to be made and 2. conducting dozens of relationships in accordance with that perspective apparently doesn’t negate, tarnish or trivialise a life-long yearning for a single person met before all the others i.e. you can spend your life going around sleeping with people and saying all of it is ‘love’, yet still claim that you’re devoting your entire life and all of your actions to the pursuit of someone for which your love is apparently pure and unique and undying.

Also, to put it really simply, when I’d turned the last page all I was left with was the sense that some unrelated things had happened (which were always suffocatingly detailed no matter how redundant) and people had done things, but they weren’t uncannily or cleverly woven together in any way and didn’t testify to the relevance or existence of a predetermined fate or destiny at all, which I guess I was hoping would be the case so that the entire thing would be imbued with even just a morsel of coalescence and textual integrity, and so that there’d be an excuse for the otherwise naive and asphyxiatingly sentimental conceptions of love pedalled unrelentingly throughout.

But who knows - maybe it’s better in Spanish.

Giving Love in the Time of Cholera another go.

Picked up Sense and Sensibility. Read one paragraph. Threw it across the room like it was an open jar of peanut butter and I was allergic to peanuts.

Nope, still not keen. I’ll try in another 5 years, then.

a list of what’s been recommended to me -

• Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger
• Still Alice - Lisa Genova
• His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
• The Memory Keeper’s Daughter - Kim Edwards
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac
• Cloud Street - Tim Winton
• The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
• Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kayson
• My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult
• Lock and Key - Sarah Dessen
• Just Listen - Sarah Dessen
• Looking for Alaska - John Green
• Paper Towns - John Green
• Burned - Ellen Hopkins
• Thirteen Reasons Why - Ellen Hopkins
• Crank - Ellen Hopkins
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
• The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Passage - Justin Cronin
• The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
• God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
• Sula - Toni Morrisson
• The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
  
• Chuck Palahniuk
• Cecelia Ahern

any other suggestions?