One Hundred Years of Solitude
I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time. Hell of a book! Not that it needs my endorsement.
I sometimes say that all fiction is fantasy, but what I really mean is that all fiction is fiction, and there's no inherent virtue in semi-autobiographical realism or wikifiable settings or any other mode available to an author, regardless of its popularity or prestige. García Márquez's narrator seems less beholden to realism than the voice of other "magic realist" fiction I'm familiar with, less interested in justifying or explaining things, and it's very refreshing to encounter a 20th c. novel that barrels ahead without seeming to care about any of this nonsense.