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.

Head them off at the pass!

I bought some books on Sunday. This is not, in itself, such an unusual thing. I usually have a book on the go. The difference was that I bought ten in one fell swoop.

Nowadays I can read almost any Spanish book without too much trouble. I've chosen to read more Spanish than English for two main reasons. The first is to improve my Spanish and the second is to bone up on the home culture. It does mean that I have no idea who is hip and cool amongst contemporary British writers but as I don't know the name of the Home Secretary, or the modern way to say hip and cool, you can take it that I've given up on keeping up to date with Britain. One biggish problem is that I often forget the names of the authors I've read. For some reason names like Eva García Sáenz de Urturi just don't stick in the same way as, say, Jessie Greengrass.

Anyway I am reading a book called Women of the Post War Period (Mujeres de la posguerra) by a woman called Inmaculada de la Fuente. I am finding it hard going. It's giving information about the post Civil War period in Spain by reference to the works of some famous women Spanish writers like Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite and Josefina Aldecoa. I've actually read something by three of those four authors but the continuous references to characters in their books, as a way of highlighting life in post war Spain, is becoming just a little wearing.

So, back to the book buying. In 1826 Pinoso finally became large enough to be self governing and separated from the neighbouring town of Monóvar. The event which celebrates that is called Villazgo. It's a big event in Pinoso which centres on local food, local traditions and local culture. This year's event took place last Sunday. Amongst the delights there were stalls from local associations and groups, from the local villages and from some businesses.

One of the stalls was selling old books including piles of notebook sized and notebook thick cowboy stories. The covers featured garish cartoon drawings. Inside the cheap, newsprint type paper was yellowed with age. Two euros for ten "books" seemed like a bit of a bargain. I had this vague recollection, from a radio programme that I'd heard that, back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s there was an industry in producing huge numbers of cheap, accessible books with weekly editions. I also remembered that the censors kept an eye on them to ensure that they passed on the "appropriate" messages for instance about a woman's role in obeying and keeping her man happy. I think they were also an incidental tool in a vague campaign to confront the country's shocking illiteracy rate. A definite addition to my cultural education.

This morning I chose one at random to read. El buitre de Denver (The Denver Vulture) by Silver Kane, printed in 1969 and with an original price of 9 pesetas. Apparently Kane was the pen name for Francisco González Ledesma who wrote over 1,000 novels in his lifetime. Over my breakfast cup of tea, before the household chores dragged me away, I'd read just 40 pages. Even then Kenton was already dead, shot in the back by his erstwhile partner and the gunslinger Mallory had gone a calling on Kenton's beautiful and curvaceous widow, Alice.

Definitely a bit less taxing than those postwar women.