I was thinking of our earlier thread about the HP books and other children's literature and then I was rereading a lovely novel and I thought, "Everyone should read this book." And then I was thinking about how much I wish I knew what other books people thought everyone should read. Anyway, my suggestion for today of books that everyone should read is:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold
I first read this book for my high school AP English class in senior year and I like it just as much now as I did then. I was a little suspicious of it at first, because the year before I had read "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" and I didn't like the short story much, but Chronicle soon won me over. It is rather like reading about the Titanic- so many ways that the disaster should have been avoided and, yet, somehow it still comes to pass.
The only odd thing is that I still have the same copy as I did in high school and it has all my notes for my paper in the margin and lots of underlining.