Good luck with reading Spanish! Please be easy on yourself, it took me 4 years of reading off and on to get to the point of reading books like “1491: Una nueva historia de las Américas antes de Colón“. Also, factual based books are much, much easier to understand than novels. The problem with reading Gabriel García Márquez is that reality and un-reality are blended together using sophisticated grammatical constructs that you have no idea what is going on. Remember, language can express things that are abstract. Abstraction in a second language is hard!

If I have one piece of advice for you, please try to completely avoid reaching for the dictionary (app or physical) while reading your books. Not only will avoiding the dictionary make the reading faster, your pattern matching will improve because your mind will be forced to “fill in the blanks” where there is insufficient understanding. I know there are polyglots out there that advise the opposite of “don’t go to the next page until you know everything”. Bah humbug, reading should not be a homework assignment.

Finally, buying the audiobook and reading along with the book will help train your ear for faster pattern recognition and signal/noise differentiation. Be advised though that audio books may not be one to one exact with the printed text.

I also recommend “Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate”.