The Bookhive List: 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A big part of the reason that I love this novel is that it was very difficult for me to get into it and to finally finish it, which is particularly embarrassing because someone I know had the same problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude and I gave them a lot of grief about it. If you are already a Gabriel Garcia Marquez fan, you probably already have read and love this novel, but if not I urge you to read all of it -- short stories, novels, and non-fiction. And this is not the novel to start with; you have to build up to Love in the Time of Cholera, but it is such a rich and rewarding experience, when you finally get there.

The Bookhive List: 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People who took four years of high school Spanish will tell you that you can't really appreciate Gabriel Garcia Marquez in English translation. These people probably heard this from their Spanish teacher and now whip it out at parties as a kind of intellectual gauntlet-throw-slash-conversation-ender. Gently remind these assholes that Gabriel Garcia Marquez read many of his favorite authors via translation, including those whose influence is most strongly felt in his work, like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. And to say this about Gabo and not every other author who doesn't write in English is truly insulting.

Read One Hundred Years of Solitude, please, in whatever language you prefer. Besides being one of the greatest family epics ever written, it is also the quintessential magical-realism novel. It is beautiful and it is very affecting and despite what the wannabe Spanish snobs might tell you, it is a worthwhile endeavor even in English.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

The Bookhive List: 'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

I read East of Eden in the midst of a very tough semester of college. I was neck-deep in art history, which meant endlessly memorizing and regurgitating artwork identifications for slide exams, and although it was hardly the most responsible use of my free time, I decided to start reading for pure pleasure, and East of Eden was the perfect escape because it had absolutely nothing to do with anything I was studying.

Everyone reads The Grapes of Wrath at some point, and East of Eden shares plenty in common with Steinbeck's other big novel, but I found it to be a much more enjoyable reading experience. It certainly benefits from not being foisted on anyone in high school, but also it seemed to me to be the more mature of the two novels. Both novels play around with morality but East of Eden has truly sympathetic characters. The Grapes of Wrath presents morally ambiguous characters that are difficult to love or admire, and that is the whole point; East of Eden, however, deals more in archetypes, in this case Biblical archetypes, and the results are clearly-drawn divisions between "good" characters and "bad" characters. But this never veers in an oversimplification of human morality, and the results are emotionally compelling and endlessly readable. I definitely had a reading phase of enjoying epic familial/generational novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Middlesex, and East of Eden fits very comfortably in that group. If you haven't yet, do yourself the favor of checking out Steinbeck's lesser-read novels.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

The Better Beach Read

I have always hated the phrase "beach read," and the notion it represents, that somehow your vacation is the only appropriate time for pleasure reading or genre fiction. It seems like the kind of unrealistic trope that is exacerbated by magazines, like you should buy some sunglasses based on your "face shape" and a swim suit that emphasizes your "small bust" and get a "beach read" for your vacation. I have a tendency to bring on vacation any book on my TBR list that is compact and lightweight, i.e. paperback, and there is usually no rhyme or reason to it. That said, I can concede that people often want good books for vacation time with the implication being that they'll be sitting in a hammock, on a beach, or poolside for long stretches of time and need a book that they can really disappear into. Thus, the following, my recommendations for beach books this summer:

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