Life in Culebrón

In 2004 Spanish bookshops were intimidating places. Berlin Wall like there was nearly always a counter and the books were behind it. They were protected by someone, invariably older, invariably stern, Dickensian even - villainous Dickensian. There were shelves too, sometimes in the Allied Zone, but without apparent order. Lots of the shops were dark and dusty with piles of books. The organisation of the books was a secret known only to that formidable bookshop employee. As well as looking sinister the person behind the counter spoke Spanish. Another big hurdle. But I'd decided early on in my Spanish adventure that reading in Spanish was a good way to tackle the language so these obstacles had to be overcome. After a couple of bad buys, panicked into buying some Spanish classic with impenetrable prose, I decided to try something I'd already read in English. I'd been told that translated books were often easier to read. Hemingway, and his short sentences seemed like a good p...

For years and years I've been fed up that my Spanish isn't as good as it should be. It's always seemed to me that without being able to read, understand and speak Spanish we immigrants become perpetual tourists. Obviously some things get translated for us and they are accessible because the Internet makes them so but lots of stuff will sneak by if we are not able to understand the conversations of our neighbours, read about events or keep up with the current affairs type memes that pop up on social media. I try to do something Spanish language most days. I have conversations with people on the Internet or I read a few pages from a book or learn a few words. I read and watch Spanish news, I listen to Spanish radio and other bits and bats. I'm also still on the mailing list for a couple of language learning websites too. One of them, a video blog, suggested that we should set ourselves a language challenge; do something that was a bit beyond our grasp - pushing the envelo...

My latest book is a political biography about the bloke who was President of Spain, on the losing side, in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. I heard it reviewed on a podcast I listen to. Normally, when I read or hear about a potential book to read I download a sample to my eBook or save it to a wants list so that, when the time comes to buy something, I have a few queued up ready to compare and contrast. Like all the books I read in Spanish I will forget the title and author. Spanish names just don't stick. I've often had conversations with Spaniards asking if I've read something. I deny all knowledge but then, as they describe the content, I have to admit that I have. I'd heard mention of a book by Benjamin Black on the Spanish radio; it was being offered as a competition prize. It turns out that Benjamin Black is a pen name for the Irish writer John Banville. I had never heard his name before yet I have no trouble at all remembering it. Why do I remember John Banville ju...

I was sitting in the garden. I had my feet up and a beer in one hand and an electronic book in the other so I was reading and drinking or drinking and reading. Maggie pounded past every now and then following that couch to five kilometres programme. One of the cats looked on. I like books as things. I always think of bookshops as being precise; very neat. They often have a lovely smell too. Fan the pages as you sniff or just breathe deeply as you browse. Nowadays Spanish bookshops are much like British ones - easy access shelves and an impossible range of classifications which only make sense to the person who chose the labelling system. I mean is Philip K. Dick's Rick Deckard in a detective or a sci-fi novel? Not so long ago Spanish bookshops used to be much more difficult, much darker, very Dickensian, musty even. They had men with pince-nez behind wooden counters acting as gatekeepers to the shelves piled high with books at their backs. Old style Spanish bookshops had almost...

"You use a lot of continuous tenses in your books. Is there any particular reason for that?". It's an interview on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, some twenty years ago. The author was from the USA, he was pleased. "Being interviewed in England is just so great - you want to talk about my use of grammar!". When we first arrived in Spain I wanted to try reading in Spanish but bookshops used to scare me. They usually had counters and the books were on shelves behind the counter. If you wanted to buy a particular book it was fine. You just asked. In Spanish. Of course they never had the book but you were hooked now, you had to order it, wait two or three weeks and then be shocked by the price. Spanish books are expensive. If you wanted to browse then tough luck. Slowly that changed. Faced by online sellers lots of traditional bookshops went to the wall, despite price protection, and the survivors became more self service. In the newer shops you could...

I don't have any work between the end of June and the beginning of September. No pay either so it's not quite as good as it sounds. And with Maggie working mornings our options about getting out and about have been a little more restricted too. This is one of the reasons that I've got through quite a lot of books over the summer. That and because I prefer short books. Reading ten books with 200 pages is only like reading a couple of big thick books. Anyway I get bored with one style, one set of vocabulary and the same basic theme. Generally I've read books in Spanish - partly to try and improve my language but also so that  I have a bit more local culture under my belt. After all you don't need to have read every Kate Atkinson or Stieg Larsson to be able to have a conversation about their style. Talking about what you have read is a common enough conversation so the more points of reference I have the greater the possibility of maintaining that dialogue. The onl...

I read something, in an electronic newspaper, yesterday that said that our President, Mariano Rajoy, isn't a big reader. It went on to say that the only complete newspaper he has left on his desk, alongside the daily news roundup written by his staff, is a sports newspaper called Marca. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but he doesn't strike me as any sort of intellectual or even a deep thinker so it may well be true. It would certainly be in line with the last survey of the Sociological Investigation Centre - Centro de investigaciones sociológicas - which reports that 34% of Spaniards have not read a book in the last twelve months, that 10% read only one book in the last year and that just 7% read more than a book a month. Maybe this explains why many children are unsure of the name of the capital city of Spain. Talking of books my pal Carlos, writing under the pen name of Carlos Dosel , has just self published a book on Amazon - police story with a Nazi wa...

Reading is a funny thing. When I worked in the UK I grew to hate reading. I had to wade through so many pages of so much verbiage full of TLAs (three letter acronyms,) where spades were never spades. Nowadays I'm back to reading for pleasure, well pleasure and for the information that reading provides. I try to read novels in Spanish. Sometimes I can't understand the books I choose but nowadays I can read most novels without too much difficulty. That's one of the reasons that I usually read on a Kindle because it allows me a dictionary for those key words I don't know. Obviously I'm reading the read the book because something about it interests me but there is also a part that is about trying to improve my Spanish through the practice, the vocabulary and the language structures. More importantly though I'm trying to get a handle on the culture. Not culture in the Cervantes or Shakespeare sense - culture in the description of how life was or is, the hist...

Once upon a time we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo in the province of Salamanca more or less on the border with Portugal. It was a lovely spot but it was a long way from home and, to be honest, it was a long way from anywhere. Our nearest hypermarket was about 120kms away in Salamanca City and the nearest Mini dealer was in Portugal. At the time I commented on the difficulty of buying a book in a bookshop in Spain. Since then I have bought and read quite a few books in Spanish and I usually have a list of books that I want to read; I am catching up on a culture after all. The routine now, when I go into a bookshop, is to have a quick look where I think the book may be, and then, when it isn't, summon up my courage and ask. I wanted to take a couple of books on holiday. I'd heard a programme on the radio about an author called Carmen Laforet and one of hers sounded good. We were going to an area in Spain called the Alcarria and there was another book, written in the 1940s ...