Reading a book

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 place to start. I chose For Whom the Bell Tolls, a story set in Spain. At the time Corte Inglés, the department store, was still a Spanish Institution. Being a department store it was, largely, self service. The book section was a bit more like the UK bookshops I was used to. I wrote the, translated, name of the book and the author on a piece of paper and showed it in Corte Inglés. Their indexing system, their cataloguing system, was so labyrinthine that even a person who worked there wandered from bookcase to bookcase mouthing the title and occasionally re-assuring me that she was sure they had it. If they did she didn't find it. In the end I ordered the book from Juan, one of the local places to buy books in Pinoso, and only four weeks later it was mine. That three to four week delay is still pretty normal if you order a book that isn't on the bestseller list. 

Books are expensive in Spain and so, faced with the cost and the difficulty of buying books, I joined the library. At that time speaking in Spanish was traumatic. I'd practice the phrase all the way to the counter encounter and then stumble over every word. In fact the joining process proved dead easy. Librarians, unlike book sellers, seemed pleased to see me and to help. My original library card, with a mugshot from 2005, still works.

These days I usually read e-books. I prefer print books but e-books, well Kindle in my case, have a bundle of advantages. 

Price is a big advantage. E-books are half the price of an actual book. In fact when I used to buy from the Amazon UK site the books written in Spanish, available there, were often even cheaper than the same book on the Spanish Amazon website. 

Then there is the advantage of electronic browsing before buying. It's possible to download sample pages so you can decide whether you like the style before parting with your hard won wealth. Lots of classic books are free but the language tends to be difficult.

For me though the huge advantage of reading on an e-book, in a foreign language, is that all the devices from dedicated readers to mobile phones, come with dictionaries. Some of the dictionaries come free as part of the software bundle but I also bought the Collins Spanish to English dictionary. That means that getting instant definitions of any essential word in the Spanish book that I'm reading is just a press away.

There are some books that I want to read that are only published in paper. When that's the case I ask one of the local shops to order the book. I usually have a queue of books to read on the e-book so the wait isn't as onerous as it once was. I could get them quicker, and a bit cheaper, online but supporting local business always feels honourable and you can say thanks Juan or Mariló y Susana which makes you feel a bit more like you belong.

The last thing was knowing what to read. The big bookshops all have displays which are easy to wander around, as do the big supermarkets like Eroski, Alcampo or Carrefour. There is a price fixing system in Spain so the big outlets only have a slight price advantage over local bookshops. Local bookshops may or may not have browsable displays but the new stuff is nearly always in the window. I pick up most of my recommendations for new books from an artsy radio podcast I listen to but that's because I like the programme in general. All of the Radio and TV channels have book review programmes and finding book review podcasts and video channels is only a Google away. And, back at the library they have a new acquisitions display which makes it dead easy.

And keep the change for yourself

Spain is bespattered with Chinos, Chinese owned shops. There are two principal types. One is like the old British corner shop where the family work all the time. It opens late, it sells sweets, pop and stuff plus basic food and all sorts of things that seem a bit out of place - piles of flip flops in over brittle and discoloured plastic bags piled on top of the crisp boxes. Here in Pinoso we don't have one of those. Our 24 hour shop, or it may be shops, are Spanish run. 

We do have two Chinos though; ours are the sort that sell everything except food. There are tools, cleaning products, stationery, earphones, phone cases, reading glasses, clothing, cleaning products, photo frames, light bulbs, pet supplies and a trillion other things. We Brits love them. We can hunt around the shelves looking for whatever it is rather than having to mime and splutter to, for instance, the person behind the haberdashery shop counter, "Err, I don't know how to say knicker elastic in Spanish." The two Chinese shops in Pinoso are awash with Britons though they're popular with the locals too.

The Chinos were the first places to close when the pandemic hit. I think there was a fear amongst the Chinese community that there would be some sort of racist backlash - the sort of knee-jerk stupidity beloved of the incoherent Donny Trump. When we moved phase here, when the stranglehold of quarantine started to be relaxed, the shops started to re-open. One of the Chinese shops couldn't because it's bigger than 400 square metres and the regulations said "no" to big shops. The other could though. I couldn't avoid the temptation as I passed on the first day it re-opened and I came away grinning with my haul of paint brushes, hosepipe connectors, car shampoo and whatnot. I hear that the bigger Chinese shop has now re-opened but that it's on a sort of ask at the door process. I've scratched my own itch so I've not been in. I have been to a bookshop though, and an ironmongers and the cold meat and olive stalls in the market. Spreading my paltry wealth around.

It's been good to see the "non essential" shops opening up again. It seems to be much more a hopeful sign of the return to normality, of fewer people dying, of politicians calling each other terrorists and coup plotters, than being able to go for a stroll or do a bit of exercise close to home for a limited period in a delimited time. To tell the truth, with being able to travel in province again, we made an appointment and went down to Torrellano to look at second hand cars. Whilst we were there we went to a bar with a view over the Med. It wasn't the first bar we've been to since the confinement began to ease - the machine coffee and the ice cold beer were great but, even better, it felt just like any old day in Spain for a while.

In general things seem to be getting back on track. This morning I had to get up early to take Maggie to her hairdresser who works a little outside Pinoso. Maggie told me that the appointment queue for the haircutter had been a long one as people made up for weeks of folicular fecundity. I know that my mum, in the UK, is really anxious to get her first professional shampoo and set after weeks of staying at home.

Who knows we may still get a fiesta or a concert or something this year.

Moving my lips as I read

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 no recognisable organisation and if you were after something specific you couldn't browse - you had to ask. That scared me to death - speaking Spanish. Besides, when you asked you were committed. Do you have Blahdy blah by whatchamacallher? and you were on the road to an order and a two week wait to get the book that could cost a surprising amount of money. Some dozen or so years ago a recommendation for Antonio Gala's, Cosas nuestras set me back 45€ in paperback.

Nowadays I tend to read on a Kindle because, if I'm reading in Spanish, I can use the inbuilt dictionary to look up any key words I don't know. It was Kindle that confirmed me as a staunch Amazon customer. They have nearly everything and they deliver faster than you can drive to the shop. Spanish books are expensive, they have a controlled retail price with discounting only allowed to, I think, 5% of publishers recommended price so the price isn't that important because the market is artificially controlled. I sometimes use other online suppliers, especially for out of print books, but because I'm an Amazon customer it's dead easy to order a book within seconds of reading a review or hearing a recommendation. As the seconds become minutes, if the book exists in electronic form, it's yours. Real paper books come tomorrow or maybe the day after. I know about Amazon and taxes but I know that you too are happy to avoid taxes when you can and there is a chasm between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

I buy only novels from Amazon. I still buy books with pictures from bookshops or sometimes online. The last paper book I bought, because I expected it to have pictures, was about some of the plants featured in the paintings in the Prado museum. I made the mistake of ordering it from a shop in Pinoso. It was a lovely book and I enjoyed it a lot but it cost me 22€ for a paperback and, more annoyingly, it took 5 weeks, yes 5 weeks, to arrive.

With Spain being closed the bookshops are closed too. The independent stores are in danger of going under. I listen to a couple of radio programmes that have a cultural bent and both of them seem to be mounting a campaign in defence of bookshops. I don't quite understand why. Retail is a cut-throat business. Grocer's shops, cobblers, clothes shops, horse crop retailers, in fact all independent shops, were overwhelmed by big stores. Nowadays those physical shops are increasingly under pressure from online retailers. Why is there such a feral defence of bookshops when there wasn't for ironmongers or record shops? Is it a class thing?

By the book

"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 judge a book by its cover, turn pages, read a few lines, check the price and whatnot before deciding to buy or not.

I also discovered libraries. Cheap and browser friendly but not quite the same as owning a book. I also realised that books written in Spanish and bought from Amazon UK were, even after delivery charges, cheaper than the same book bought in Spain.

Then Maggie bought me a Kindle and my reading habits changed. It was still cheaper to buy Spanish language books from the UK than from Spain but now they came instantly and with samples. No nice covers though, no paper and glue smell on fanning the pages and print size became a personal choice. After a while Amazon forced me to become Spanish, website wise, but I was, and I am happy with Kindle. One of the big advantages of electronic reading for foreign languages is that the dictionary is inbuilt so, if looking up a word is essential, it interrupts the reading flow a lot less.

Reading in another language has made me more aware of the differences in books. Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne are a harder read than Sally Rooney or Kate Atkinson simply because of when they were written. Some authors though are easier to read than others because of their style and vocabulary choice. I'm a bit out of touch with modern English language writers but, as an example, I remember Philip Roth as being a harder read than Joseph Heller. If I decide to buy a book by Kate Bernheimer or Terese Svoboda in English I may or may not like it but it's very unlikely that I won't understand it.

That's not always the case when I'm buying a book in Spanish. Sometimes Spanish language books are full of words that I don't know, they can have a complicated, difficult to follow, structure and they can have cultural references that I don't understand. Julio Cortázar for instance was Argentinian and famous for his book Rayuela; easy enough to read but so pointless that I've tried it and abandoned it twice. Or Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas, a supposed classic, which my own personal review records as being awful: dry, boring and incomprehensible. Sometimes the books are beyond my language grasp. I've tried to read Diario de un Cazador by Miguel Delibes a couple of times. It actually seems like it might be good but there is so much slang, so much colloquial speech, that I've had to admit it's beyond me.

When I buy a book that I find I don't like or I can't understand I often go back to the tried and tested for the next book. Someone like Isabel Allende for instance, or maybe a police story by Lorenzo Silva. Mind you that doesn't always work. I'd just read a book by Marcos Giralt Torrente that I really didn't like so I thought I'd read a Pérez-Reverte. This bloke pumps out books like there's no tomorrow and they're fine, easy to read, often with a nice narrative. I'd seen one called Cabo de Trafalgar, about the Battle of Trafalgar and I thought it would be a hoot to have a book where Nelson and Collingwood were the baddies. Bad mistake, nautical terms on every line: topsails, boatswains, forecastles, rigging and monkeys left right and centre but also with French and English speech spelled to be pronounced in Spanish - guar is bisnes for war is business - I still enjoyed it but it wasn't easy. So, lets hope that Jesús Carrasco has a good one with Intemperie which is the book I've just bought.

Books, bookshops and libraries

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 by Camilo José Cela, about a chap wandering that area. It sounded good too. 

Both Cela and Laforet are famous, if a little old fashioned, in the Aldous Huxley, George Orwell or Virginia Woolf sort of way. I didn't have sufficient time for an Internet order and the p+p makes that an expensive option anyway. I tried our local newsagent cum bookshops and, predictably, they didn't have the books though both were willing to order them. Instead I diverted a little from one of our trips down to the coast and went to Alicante. I tried Fnac, Casa del Libro and el Corte Inglés - all three big booksellers - and manged to get one of the two. I tried again in Segovia and Aranjuez and nearer to home in Monóvar. In each case asking for the book caused either shelf rummaging or several minutes of computer tapping. In Segovia I had three people working for me for a few moments. They were only slightly less in the dark about where the book may be on the shelves than I was. No book.

Holiday over I checked the online library database and found that Pinoso library had the Cela book so, when they re-opened after fiestas, I popped in. The book was on the shelves, in fact it's been there since 1958 and it was a little worse for wear. Nonetheless, it still had legible printed words on a page and did the trick nicely.

Not too long ago, on the telly, there was a campaign to promote reading amongst the young. The slogan was something like "If you read, they'll read." Those parents are going to need a lot of staying power to get hold of the books they want if my experience is anything to go by.