Book in hand, you are taken to the little island home of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. There, she presents to you a few specially collected shells from the nearby sands and explains what each one means to her in regards to life and relationships. You are shown the channeled whelk, the moon shell, the double-sunrise, the oyster bed, and the argonauta. You are taught about the ebbs and flows of living, of your right to discovering yourself, to the multitude of ways relationships can take form, and how to be alone. After, you are treated with an author’s reflection about two decades after the original publishing, allowing her to point out where she feels she went wrong, where she went right, and how her past thoughts apply to herself in a new stage of life.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book where a summary would give away the story, and with it, its meaning. But to explain, Gabriel Garcia Marquez follows the mystical and miraculously uncommon, commonplace lives of a doomed family in town of Macondo, a make-believe town situated in the tropics. You get to experience their sometimes dull, sometimes incredulous lives while also receiving information on various events that are actually disguised commentary of real happenings and feelings of real people. It is a must-read book that somehow manages to confuse, bore, delight, and upset all in one go (or in many, as I had to due to the number of times I put it down due to simply feeling frustrated or tired of it).