100 Years of Solitude

What Hacker News says

1. coolThingsFirstJul 2026
   What an imbecillic thing to say and shamelessly glossed with some autistic idea of maximizing info throughout.

   Prose is an art form, reading 100 years of solitude is not the same as reading the news.

   thread
2. antonvsJun 2026
   Look into the book "100 Years of Solitude".
   thread
3. mtalantikiteSep 2025
   > I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages.

   Well, novels are just more subtle. A good novel will get you deep into the emotional landscape of it's subject, or give you a vivid portrait of a scene that is happening, or transport you to a historical or future time. You get to embody a particular character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy. We're not just reading a collection of facts or statements. We can get lost in the beauty of a landscape we've never visited before in a novel, which is the crux of the matter, even if it doesn't seem like it.

   Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.

   Show morethread
4. alephnerdApr 2025
   Medellin is Colombia, not Mexico.

   Also, the Colombian Cartels are a different set of organizations that have different origins from the Mexican Cartels - the former being a side effect of the Colombian Civil War and the latter being a side effect of the 1990s Peso Crisis and the mass layoffs in the Mexican Army and Petrochemicals industry

   Read or watch "100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. The fissures of the 1899-1903 Colombian Civil War (4-10% of Colombians died) were never resolved and it morphed into "La Violencia" which then morphed into the ongoing Colombian conflict.

   You need money to buy weapons, so Colombian insurgent groups (right and left leaning) entered the drug trade to arm themselves - especially after the USSR reduced funding in the 70s-80s to concentrate on Afghanistan.

   You see the same dynamics in Afghanistan, Syria, and Myanmar.

   Show morethread
5. kylecazarOct 2024
   100 Years of Solitude is my favorite. I majored in Spanish literature in college, that was my first exposure to Gabriel García Márquez (I read it in the original Spanish, but I'm told the English translation is faithful and very good).
   thread
6. zubairqMar 2024
   100 years of solitude was a book that left such an imprint on me. I read it nearly 25 years ago, and it was many years after reading the book that I finally started to understand it, but glad that I read it.. a true masterpiece!
   thread