Books to Read in Spain

From the shelves of the library last night, I sent the following text to a handful of friends: “Give me the name of a book to read in Spain.” And I got the following responses. May the following list direct your own personal book list, and also show you just the sort of people I’m friends with.

Caroll: Don Quixote de La Mancha, Make Way For Ducklings

Annelies: The Historian, Don Quixote

David Alexander (or “The Man Behind My VoiceMail”): Candide by Voltaire (“Spain would be the perfect place to appreciate the hilarity of Professor Panglorn’s deduction that ours is the 'best of all possible worlds.'”)

Cindy: Water for Elephants

CD: Candide

Alexandra: A Separate Reality by Carlos Castanega. (“It’s set in Mexico and its amazing. It’s book 2 in a series about shaman and mescaline.”)

Deee: Anything by Pablo Neruda, The Sparrow by M D Russell

Katy: Don Quixote, Zorro by Isabelle Allende

April: Middlemarch, by George Eliot

JKE: Don Quixote

So that’s it, people! Apparently we should all be reading Don Quixote. Get crackin’. I expect book reports from all of you when I return. And a regretful circumstance—the library had very few of these books (read: none of them, which the exception of Make Way for Ducklings, Middlemarch, and Candide). So I checked those three out, along with a Muriel Spark. Katy was so generous as to fling Allende and The Historian at me from her passing car window (actually, she had already parked her car, so we met on a dark, unmarked corner under the trees of Absinthe, where she secretly slid me the books like so many dime bags on Upper Haight). Then we nodded silently at each other in a mutual understanding (“Book Whores”).

The last on my list is Deee's Pablo recommendation (she's absolutely right! How can I NOT take Pablo with me to Espana, where I will sit in a cafe, rain falling around me, and absorbing the words of a master poet? HELLOOOOO! Jump in my back pocket, Pablito. We are TRAVELIN.')