One Hundred Years of Solitude

What Hacker News says

1. KotlopouOct 2026
   I don't understand the supposed value of AI-made art tailored to the viewer's wishes. One of the best film-watching experiences I've had recently was After Hours, which I got sent to by some random online article linking to a scene [1]. I would never have asked for this film or been able to describe it without having seen it. My favorite book of all time is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was forced to read in high school (balancing out all of the other nonsense they made us read) -- it's set in a small Colombian town and has about as little to do with my life (in a capital city in Central Europe) as imaginable. I love the webcomic 1/0 [2], whose author was a creationist when writing it (I found it as an insufferable atheist kid).

   We find art that is fun and interesting and unexpected and it expands what we are. That's one of the purposes of art. Watching something predictable eventually gets your survival boredom instinct to kick in. Is this not a common experience?

   [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iwo4-wcodpM&pp=0gcJCXICo7VqN5tD

   [2] https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=170

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2. slipperydipperyAug 2025
   With the really young kids you could lead with One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are lots of times you're not really showing them pictures in the book—or they're too young even for that, really, can't focus their eyes well—and they just need to hear the sounds and flow of language, not to understand every word (or any words). I read mine To the Lighthouse and shit like that, it was great, I think each kid got three or four "classics" while very young. I could pare down my own to-read list while being "a good parent", LOL, felt like a cheat code.
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3. photochemsynJun 2025
   Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.

   Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.

   Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).

   You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.

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4. nottorpJun 2025
   One Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :)

   No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.

   Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.

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5. nihzmJan 2025
   Roughly sorted by thickness (for the editions I own), these are among my favourites and arguably a good starting point

   * Animal Farm - George Orwell

   * The Fall - Albert Camus

   * Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

   * One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

   * The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

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6. nihzmJan 2025
   My favourite (fiction) book this year was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. An amazingly intricate storyline with a perfect ending.
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