After Reading
When You're Not Ready A Reader's Journey with One Hundred Years of Solitude
There are books that wait for us, and there are books we must wait for. One Hundred Years of Solitude taught me the difference. When reading becomes a struggle—when the words resist you, when the pages feel like walls—don’t force it. Don’t push yourself through a work that refuses to open itself to you. Don’t wrestle with sprawling narratives that seem deliberately chaotic, don’t strain to untangle generations of characters whose names echo and multiply across decades, don’t exhaust yourself distinguishing between José Arcadios and Aurelianos. These barriers exist for a reason. They are not defects in the book; they are messages from your unready self. They whisper: Not yet. Not now. I was in high school when I first...
North Ward