Solitude for Gabríel Garcia Márquez

I have yet to meet anyone that does not profess to loving One Hundred Years of Solitude, and to follow it up with how 'Márquez's magic realism brought Latin American to the world.' It was,  when I was in my 20s, a literary rite of passage for those that aspired to be well read. Well, I confess: I still have to read it.
It has been on my reading list for years, and like Ben Okri's The Famished Road, I just cannot read and finish it. Maybe it's just me and magic realism. But with 2014 being the year I read everything, One Hundred Years of Solitude has just crept up the reading list - nothing like the death of what the world calls a brilliant writer to suddenly make one seek out a piece of their work - or in this case, a Nobel Prize-winning piece of their work - if only to understand what the world has been talking about all these years. Gabríel Garcia Márquez, or 'Gabo' as he was affectionately known throughout Latin America, was a prolific writer. Colombia and his adopted Mexico, together with the world mourned the loss of a remarkable writer on April 17, 2014.