"Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

What is love? According to the ancient Greeks, there are four types of love: agápe, éros, philía, and storgē. Love is uncontrollable. Love is endemic. Love is pandemic. Love evolves over time, noticeably over 51 years, 9 months and 4 days. To think "Love in the Time of Cholera" as a purely romantic novel is a singular perspective. Sure, it is heartwarming to read about two septuagenarians rekindling old flames after all those years. It is indisputable that this novel is 368 pages of cataclysmic passion, made especially potent in the translation of Edith Grossman, replete with vehement vocabularies. Reading between the lines reveals a critical survey on all levels of love and relationships - between God and men (in terms of faith, institutional behaviours and the sacrament of marriage), between parents and children (two pairs of contrasted parental relationships), abstinence, promiscuity. blind love, hopeless love, deliberated love, selfish love, self love (in the spiritual sense of self discovery and physical sense of masturbation), paedophilia, you name it. Love causes madness, invites murder, incites suicide. It is a bit like reading "Lolita", there is no moral to the story and, indeed, love itself. All talks of "happily thereafter", "New Fidelity" and "together at last" come at the price of stepping over the bodies of others, sometimes literally. Beauty to one is ugliness to the other, love is selfish after all. This novel is the perfect amalgamation of intellectualism and emotionalism. Every sentence is nuanced and breathtaking, full of humour and wit. It is so dense (in every sense of the word) that I had to digest it in two sittings over the course of a year, and I made the terrible mistake of reading Pablo Neruda's love poems in parallel that I nearly smothered myself with South American passion. It could very well be one of the best things you will ever read in your life. You will learn to love it as you learn to love.

"Lolita" (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, hard to swallow, pain in the backside. Rewarding pain, if anything. Let's put it out there first: there are the obvious controversial and outrageous contents - paedophilia, deceit, kidnap, rape, murder. It has all the thrills to warrant a Stanley Kubrick treatment. It is not difficult to see why it is highly and widely regarded as an important piece of literature despite the subject matter, but it takes a lot of effort to align your thoughts as you read on. The novel is famous for having an unreliable narrator - that is, the story of paedophilia, deceit, kidnap, rape and murder is told by the offender. The prose is written in some flowery language that is legitimately beautiful. It is full of double entendres, puns, literary references, allusions and metaphors, and French. It is a masterclass in the English language and in the art of narration. Because it is effectively written as a stream of consciousness, or the "memoir", of a beguiling criminal mind, you have to constantly peruse the text to distill out the "hard facts" and patch up the events in chronological order. It sounds like detective work, but it is worse as you need to keep judging. There are clearly no morals to the story, and the author makes it clear by appending a fictional foreward given by some "psychology scholar" at the beginning to "critique" the "memoir". Nabokov himself then published a genuine afterword to disown the foreword. It is not so much about messing up one's mind in terms of being factually confusing, but upon finishing, the more thoughtful and inquisitive readers are left with plenty of unsettled questions: in each scenario, who really are the victims and offenders given the readers only have one heavily biased perspective? Did event A happen before event B, which would change the order of precedence in terms of offence? Where do my own morals lie? In fact, are my comprehension skills intellectually sound? In any case, every character in this novel is a loser in a dystopia that inevitably collapses in a magnificent way. Fundamentally, this novel is a long stretch of good quality black humour. It is sufficient to merely say, "Haha, that was good."

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez

What do we know about "One Hundred Years of Solitude"? Let's list the obvious: it is Márquez's magnum opus, an epic story of the seven generations of the Buendía family and of the establishment and rise and fall of the fictional Colombian city Macondo; there is the famous "magical realism" bending the real and surreal; the trademark humour and sarcasm; lots of incest; and of course, the theme of solitude. Who suffers from solitude? Well, everybody, you can't escape it. It is written in the stars, or in the cards, or... I won't spoil the book for you. One can be the person who brings utopia and order to everybody, but when one declines, in health or in power otherwise, one is left to rot in solitude. One can, of course, choose to voluntarily pursue solitude - in times of despair, regrets, remorse, obsession or madness. Unpopular people are left in solitude. Popular people so perfect to the point of being untouchable are left in solitude. Well-endowed children die in the hands of men (boys) - in solitude. Neglected children die in the hands of nature - in solitude. It does not matter what names you are given, it does not matter what (political or religious) beliefs you have, it does not matter whether you die for common good or ascend to the heavens without even dying, as long as one lives, fundamentally, one lives and leaves in solitude. It is a somewhat Buddhist worldview. These microcosmic stories of solitude are considered to represent the fate of an entire continent. It is very easy to over-interpret the work. The content is rich, the language is dense and it takes a lot of effort to parse 400 pages of solid text (10 pt font, single line spacing), but when you close the back cover at the end, you take a deep breath, then realise we are all tiny ants in the history of humanity. It is comparatively dry and emotionally detached against "Love in the Time of Cholera", but it is one of those magnificent human achievements that, in reverence, makes you feel irrelevant as a person.