Moataz El El itibaren El Carmen, Ekvador itibaren El Carmen, Ekvador

I loved this book and it made me want to believe in love(nah!). The best of Gabriel Garcia-this tale of heartbreak,lose and love is classic. The story is as hot as the Caribbean climate and it reminds me of an old Arabic poetic verse that translates roughly to (what is love but to the first lover) which is true, we all remember the first person that knocked on doors of our hearts whether in adolescence or later on in college . The main character Fermina Daza is the love interest of Florentino Ariza (my favorite) he's love for her is bold,passionate and unfortunately young too young. Simply put, the story doesn't go as planned and Fermina realizes under pressure from her father that love is not enough, that she needs security both financial and emotional(in my opinion i think she feared the thing she needed the most)and erroneously she marries an older doctor who is stable, smart and organized. Our hero Florentino carries the love of his youth to adulthood to old-age and through the change in time that romance is never changed. He realizes that the reason Fermina left him because of his naïveté(she's his first-awww)thus he goes and transforms himself to a modern day Casanova and writes his exploits in black notebooks as i remember. Nevertheless, what is meant to be will always be in terms of love stories and I won't say more You should read it for yourself. I just have to quote Paulo here "All love stories are the same"

I tried to get into this book. Went over 100 pages. This is just way too analytical for my tastes. I want to enjoy books, and though Burgess clearly lvoes Joyce and he writes well, this is way worse than any high school English class analyzing a book. For those who like that level of intense scrutiny they will likely love this book. But not me.

I did not think I would like this tale of war and stammering and poison and Rome. There were far too many characters whose names seemed to blob together like one big drip of candle wax. And as soon as I thought I knew who one daughter of a brother of a possible emperor was they had been poisoned and so it didn't matter anymore. But as Claudius grew more bold and the Romans got more raunchy I decided "Hey now, these are some crazy guys in charge of this empire. And, boy, that is sure a time that I wouldn't have wanted to be around, rich or poor, nobility or slave." or something to that effect. And now at the end our lame historian is being carried around on the shoulders of Caligula's murderers and has been declared Rome's next emperor! I'll keep that sequel on my to read list. Yeah - it was good.