A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain

Question: What does Mark Twain have in common with Shakespeare?

Answer: All they did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

You’ve probably come across Henry Louis Mencken’s quip on Shakespeare, and if we can say the same thing about any other writer, it would surely be Mark Twain.

Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is one of the world’s favorite stories, and it is one of my favorites, too. You can get great recorded books of all of Twain’s classics at Talking-Book-Store.com.

When I was living in Mexico, there was a classic I wanted to read very much but couldn’t. I bought a hard-cover copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, long before I was able to understand it.

The first year I did little more than turn the pages all the way to the end. I tried to read it again a year later, and though I understood more words, I was only scratching the surface of a great book.

If I had been using recorded books back then, I would have learned better Spanish pronunciation, at the very least, in return for all my hard work.

So I left García Márquez on the shelf for three or four years. It was a period in my life when I was chasing after some far-fetched inventions and impossible dreams of my own, very much like José Arcadio Buendía.

I wanted to know how Colonel Aureliano Buendía had gotten himself in such a sad affair as the scene that begins the book.

I wanted even more to know if somehow, at the last moment, he would escape the firing squad. I picked up the book once more, knowing that great treasures lay hidden beneath the surface of a language I had barely penetrated the last time I tried to read the book.

Wordsworth knew what treasures I was about to discover: “Books, we know, are a substantial world, both pure and good,” he said. “Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, our pastime and our happiness will grow.” I had learned a lot of Spanish in the intervening years.

But that was not the only difference this time—I understood García Márquez because the “tendrils” of my own life had grown round his book, as strong as flesh and blood. Today my happiness grows around recorded books, too.

I almost had the opportunity to meet Garcia Marquez once. I was working on a project with the daughter of one of his friends in Mexico City.

They promised to introduce me to Gabriel the next time he was in town, but by that time I was no longer in Mexico City.

Though I never met Gabriel, I have known José Arcadio and Aureliano for many years. If you are not familiar with the work of García Márquez—or if you would like to meet Colonel Aureliano Buendia—you can get started at Talking-Book-Store.com with García Márquez in 90 Minutes, written by Paul Strathern and narrated by Robert Whitfield.