Two kisses and a big hug

I wrote about the Pinoso Book Club, El Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, only a year ago but that's not going to stop me doing it again. The group is named for a local teacher and poet - well loved and still missed. You may have seen the poetry competition named after her. It also just happens to be her centenary this year.

The club is organised by the Pinoso public library, which is housed in the Centro Cultural - the modern building halfway up el Paseo de la Constitución, next to the Indian restaurant.

Like the majority of book clubs I've heard of, the plot is simple. The group reads the same book. I don't actually mean that - we have more than one. I thought to change the sentence to read that we all read similar books, but that doesn't work either. So I'll take it that you know what I mean. Anyway, after reading a book, the group comes together and comments on it. We have some, nominal, say about books for inclusion in the next "course," but really, the librarians choose the books using criteria like who's fashionable, mixing international, Latin American and Spanish authors, access to the books through the library system and slightly politicized things like not only choosing male writers.

The organization is pretty slick. We get a spiral-bound, bulky magazine-thickness booklet, which details the members of the group with contact details, dates of meetings, dates of national or international literary events, books that we'll be reading this year with a bio of the authors, a bibliography, the cover notes on the book, and any additional paperwork. It's comprehensive. The librarian and archivist who look after the group must put a fair bit of graft into its production. There are about fifteen of us in the group. I'm the only bloke, but I'm not the only Briton.

So when I joined, and I joined it as a language challenge, something a bit beyond my grasp, with the advantage of being local and with local people, I supposed that the process would be clean and simple. Read a book, in Spanish, turn up at one of the usually three weekly meetings, natter about the book, go home, and repeat the process. It turns out that the group life is much more involved than that. There are quite often book launches from local authors, and the club gets involved in those as well as things like World Women's Day or World Poetry Day. There are sometimes little outings to do with a book that we've read or an author visiting a nearby town. I've found that there have been nearly as many ancillary meetings as scheduled ones. Naturally, being Spain, the group has its own WhatsApp group, and that too can be most amusing.

I taught English in Pinoso for two or three years. In that time, quite a few local people passed through my classes, but it's only very occasionally that I see any of those old students. On the other hand, when I'm out and about in Pinoso, I keep bumping into members of the book club. I don't know why, but the book club people seem to be everywhere. It's rather nice. They're a good bunch, and they've been very kind about my faltering Spanish.

Anyway, at the beginning of this month, as the sort of end-of-course do, the group - well, the librarians - had taken the opportunity to organise a Q&A session with a writer called Elia Barceló. I read something of hers for the session, but before that, I'd never even heard of her. Her Wikipedia entry suggests that I should have. She's both well known and well regarded.

She did her session with us, and then, as we are in Spain, we went to a bar to eat and drink. I wasn't at the same table as the writer, and when the people at my table started to go home, I got ready to leave too. I thought it only good manners to say goodnight to our guest of honour even though I hadn't said a word to her all evening. The writer was effusive when she said goodbye to me. I suspect she was probably impressed by the good humour and bonhomie that the Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas generates and that she'd had a good evening.

Club de lectura Maxi Banegas

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 envelope as they used to say in my youth. Now it just so happened that, a couple of days after seeing that video, I went into Pinoso to see the unveiling of the balcony banners related to International Women's Day. One of the banners had been done by the local Book Club or Readers Circle, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas (Maxi Banegas was a poet and teacher from Pinoso). As I usually read books in Spanish, I thought, "why not?".

Bull by the horns time. I went directly from the square outside Pinoso Town Hall to the Cultural Centre which is where the library is, to ask about the book club. They seemed to think I was a bit strange, actually lots of people would agree but that's another blog! They told me I would be the only man - perhaps that was it. Maybe they were appalled by my very British accent when speaking Spanish but my take on that is that Bruno Tonioli's's Italian accent makes him cute to TV viewers so why shouldn't the same idea work for me?

Anyway they gave me a date for the club, a Wednesday of the next week. That meant a 270 page novel in eight days. Easy. The librarian seemed a bit shocked that I was willing to buy the book. Normally the library provides the books to the readers. In fact I bought the book in electronic format almost as I was talking to her. I find electronic books much easier to read than paper books, not because of any liking for the format but because the Kindle has a Spanish dictionary on it, so, when I get to a key word that I don't understand, I can look it up without interrupting the flow too much. 

I turned up the next Wednesday with the book, Aquellos tiempos robados, read. The club had been cancelled, apparently a speaker was expected and, because she was ill, the session was scrubbed. They hadn't really expected me to turn up so nobody thought to contact me. 

I have been to one meeting though. I was made to feel welcome and it was splendid that there was another Briton there. I was given a booklet which gave details of the books to be read by what dates along with author's biographies, sleeve notes and the like. Very professional. Speaking in Spanish, about a book in front of a group of about a dozen people is not as pleasant as drinking beer on a sunlit terrace but it wasn't humiliating. My Spanish may have been verging on gibberish but nobody sniggered openly. There's another meeting this evening, that makes three books I've read because of the club and all have been good, well chosen. I'm on to number four and the first few pages had me guffawing so I think it will be good too.

What's more I was able to go back to the video blog and report that envelope duly pushed.