Love In The Time Of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez

Read March-April 2007
Copy purchased at Goodwill, Fridley, Minnesota
Essay written June 24th, 2007

The dust jacket made it sound like this book was as magical as One Hundred Years Of Solitude. That turned out not to be so, but it was pretty darn good anyway. I mean, you know, the fella won a Nobel Prize for literature. They don't just give those out to chimps.

To Cholera's advantage over Solitude however, all of the characters had different names. That helps.

And how about the find! At Goodwill, where all of the books are horribly picked over and nasty. Diet books and children's books and bestsellers that nobody wants anymore. To find a sweet hardback gem like this, with its dust jacket intact, with no highlighting or underlining, and even a ribbon bookmark attached to the spine. It was a miracle. This was a year and a half ago that I found this and bought it. It sat on my shelf a long time before I finally got around to it.

At least, I think it was the Goodwill in Fridley. It might have been the Savers in Columbia Heights. That would be more likely, because the books at Savers are usually in better shape. But I seem to remember buying this at the same time as my Contract Maintenance Crew jacket and General Mills sweatshirt, that day Erik and I were there and it rained and we went to Key's, which is in Fridley.

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