GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Life in Pictures

The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who has died aged 87, helped to ignite the worldwide boom in Spanish literature with novels such as 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Here The Guardian celebrates his life with a selection of images charting his journey from childhood in northern Colombia to global literary titan.

And an interview with Isabel Allende where she remembers the life and legacy of late writer Gabriel García Márquez. She reads from his landmark novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and talks about how García Márquez influenced generations of thinkers and writers in Latin America and across the world. "He’s the master of masters," Allende says. "In a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world, and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror." Allende describes the first time she read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and how it impacted her. "It was as if someone was telling me my own story," she says. We also air video of García Márquez in his own words and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan González read from "The General in His Labyrinth."

WHAT DID YOU READ OVER THE CHRISTMAS BREAK?

Let's get intimate and share our December reads and a short opinion. Come on! It will take no more than 5 minutes. Here goes my list:

In English (first, as usual):

- Smut - two short stories by A. Bennett, who we'll be reading shortly. These stories are rather different from The Uncommon Reader, but they preserve his wittiness and irony while exploring the topic of sexuality, hidden character, and deceptiveness. VERY EASY TO READ and it's in our library in Ribeira.

- Bits and pieces of other T.Williams's plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly Last Summer, because reading A Streetcar again made me want to re-read the parts I had underlined about 9 years ago.

- Jane Austen Made Me Do It - short stories as well (see older post).

In Galician:

- Cincuenta asasinatos breves e un prólogo. I strongly recommend it! It's really easy and quick to read (short stories) and some of them really ironic and with that Galician realism that is a part of our everyday lives. "Os visitantes" and "Domingo de parricidio" are especially good. They reminded me of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.

- Amor en feminino. Antoloxía das poetas galegas. There had to be some poetry, you know that!

In Spanish:

- La mano de Fátima. I had read La catedral del mar previously so I've been wanting to read this for a long time. I enjoyed it but I'm also a little tired of the way Falcones really "tortures" his characters. Have you read it? Do you agree? What do you think?

- Asesinos sin rostro, by Henning Mankell. It's the third book I read by him and I didn't particularly enjoy it, especially the way he hurriedly solves the mystery at the end.