kayla nicole smith

today has been a good day. i went to vertical relief for a little bit, read one hundred years of solitude while drinking a latte at macy's, met a dog named fiver, and for breakfast and lunch ate free, rescued food (from the dumpster).

one hundred years of solitude is already so, so beautiful. the storytelling sucks you in, and before you know it you have this entire history painted out in your head, and the empty space keeps getting filled and expanding outward with enchanting words and people. it's what i've been looking for in a book for a long time, but its daunting length kept me from opening it until now. thank you leah, for the gift of that book. interestingly enough, i'm reading lorca in my european lit class right now; the gypsy ballads (los romanceros gitanos is the spanish title, i think). those already sucked me in and i could see parallels with chronicle of a death foretold-- especially in the ballad of one doomed to die. lorca's writing is so hermetic and cryptic --hard to crack open, but the stories are fascinating and mystical, the characters magnetic, and the images vivid and both beautiful and horrifying at times.

i feel inspired to write a list of 20books i need to read. it's good to start small.

1. one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez
2. nine stories by j.d. salinger
3. dead souls by nikolai gogol
4. fear and trembling by soren kierkegaard
5. on the road by jack kerouac
6. ficciones by jorge borges
7. the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers
8. the house on mango street by sandra cisneros
9. watership down by ryan adams
10. one flew over the cuckoo's nest by ken kesey
11. east of eden by john steinbeck
12. slaughterhouse five by kurt vonnegut jr.
13. knowledge of the holy by a.w. tozer
14. the great mother by erich neumann
15. crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky
16. sophie's world by jostein gaardner
17. othello by william shakespeare
18. the plague by albert camus
19. the sound and the fury by william faulkner
20. jitterbug perfume by tom robbins