2020-05-29 – I may have mentioned here that I am studying Spanish. Sometimes it seems slow going. Sometimes it surprises me how much I’ve learned. I’ve been working on it for maybe nueve meses (nine months).

So I thought it would be a good idea to try to work my way through a Spanish novel. I bought three online from Powell’s Bookstore. I got the names from a couple of language-learning lists that ranked these as intermediate-level Spanish. The beginner-level books were all children’s books. Here are the three:

• La Casa de los espiritus by Isabel Allende
• Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, y
• Como agua para chocolate de Laura Esquivel

I decided to start with the last one because I already know the Spanish word for “chocolate” and because it is the shortest of the three. It also contains recipes. I’m told that it also contains despair. So far I’ve only made my way through a single paragraph—with the help of Google translate. But that first paragraph seems to confirm what I’ve been told. It talks about how cutting onions and the tears that process brings.

I need a new notebook to write down all the vocabulary words. I hope that I won’t just be writing down the whole novel.

It’s going to take forever to get through even the first book.

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