Where We Read Surely Matters as Much as What We Read. As Embodied Readers, How Can it Not? How Can We Not Bring Our experience of our own place in the world to the fictional places in which we also reside? If you are like me, you take pleasure in remembering where you were when you read a particular novel and, in retrospect, how your location infiltrated your reading, never mind how different and distant the fictional place was in which you were simultaneously situated. Sometimes your reading so matches your actual location that you find yourself wondering, like Don Quixote, which is which. This was my experience in Macondo. To be accurate, my Macondo was (and is) Quimbaya, a village in the departamento (department or province) of El Quindío in Colombia, two hundred and fifty kilometers south of Medellín and ninety kilometers south of Manizales, a coffee-growing region on the western slopes of the central Andean cordillera. Quimbaya is named for the indigenous peoples who once occupied the region and produced intricate gold artifacts using the lost-wax method. Macondo and Quimbaya so mirrored each other that when I first read Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in 1969 in Quimbaya, two years after its publication, I experienced the kind of “delirio hermenéutico” ‘hermeneutic delirium’ to which the Buendías are so often apt—for me, an experience of magical realism avant la lettre. How might I have understood this novel, this world, had I not been living there?