As Gabriel García Márquez celebrates his 80th birthday, bloggers worldwide are sending their best wishes, as well as praising his works and his immeasurable contribution to literature.

According to news reports of celebrations honouring Márquez, Aracataca, his hometown, woke up to 80 cannon salvos today, which one blogger rightly feels "beats the heck out of a clock/radio".

Carolann salutes the author for making it to the grand age of 80, crowning him "one of the few top Latin American intellectuals to have really stood out", while Chelsea labels him one of the true literary giants of our time and, indeed, any time.

Unsurprisingly, Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude has earned itself the most cyber space. Many bloggers claim it is a mesmerising, magical book and that "reading it a second time was even better than the first". A blogger from Washington even touts the book as "the most beautiful book ever written, ever" - and would read it again if the person whom she lent it to would ever give it back.

Bravely straying from the novel-loving pack, one blogger claims: "Although One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold are justifiably renowned masterpieces of fiction, and although I love them, as I love so much of his work, I would have to say that my favourite of all is the short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, in Collected Stories."