Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Penguin $96 This first in the trilogy of the Columbian Nobel Laureate's memoirs spans 28 years, from his parents' courtship and marriage through his birth in 1927 (he would be the oldest of 11 children) to his early career as a journalist. Despite his father's insistence that he go to college, Garcia Marquez never gave up his desire to write. The people of his early life provide many of the characters and storylines of his novels. His parents' affair was his inspiration for Love in the Time of Cholera, and his grandfather, who fathered 12 children by different women, became the colonel in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Marquez is candid about his own flaws, such as his terrible spelling. This handicap was so glaring that, when he lost a manuscript in a taxi once, it was returned to him with the mistakes corrected in green ink.