Posted by Chris Showers on May 9th, 2009.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a book review on the site and I thought it was about time. So, today I’d like to tell you about “La Sombra del Viento” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
This book has been a bestseller here in Spain for quite some time now. In fact, I believe it was released around 2001 or 2002, and since that time it has been pretty popular in bookstores. It’s no surprise to me that it’s popular here — this book is one of the best fictional novels that I’ve ever read.
The book is about a child named Daniel who one day discovers a forgotten book on the dusty shelves of the “Forgotten Book Cemetery” — a place that his father, who owns a bookstore, frequents. Daniel becomes so intrigued by the forgotten book that he decides to investigate into the life of its author: Julián Carax. Of course, there is a problem: Carax’s life turns out to be very obscure and takes many twists and turns. Daniel soon becomes obsessed with finding out more about Carax’s life and this novel basically tells the story of Daniel’s search for information.
I really enjoyed reading this book because it is set in Barcelona, Spain right after the Spanish Civil War and is written in a way that makes you feel as if you really are in the city of Barcelona. It describes the buildings there, it describes the things the people do on the street there — it basically transcends you to the Barcelona of the early twentieth century. Another thing that I found very interesting about this book is that it is full of details and is told through several overlapping stories of love, hatred, mystery, and intrigue. These intertwined stories make the book extremely interesting to read and come together perfectly at the end of the novel to form a very well-executed closing. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on April 27th, 2009.
A man sells roses on Sant Jordi in Barcelona.
Well, I’m finally back from my school trip to Barcelona and I’m still alive after spending four days with sixty students. Honestly, the students were for the most part well-behaved and we, the teachers, really didn’t have to discipline anyone very much at all — so, it was a good trip.
I wanted to write a little something in this post about an interesting holiday that I just happened to be in Barcelona to see. It’s the day of Saint George (“Sant Jordi” in Catalán) and it’s celebrated on April 23. You see, Barcelona is quite well-known for its Saint George celebration because there it is customary for men to give women a rose on this day. Thus, as you can see in the above picture, “Las Ramblas” in Barcelona gets FULL of people buying roses at outdoor stands that are setup just for the occasion. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on June 10th, 2008.
A lot of my regular readers have asked me to recommend some books/tools that they may be able to use to help them hone and practice their Spanish skills. It is for that reason that I’d like to tell you about a great book entitled “The Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice” by Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman.
I purchased this book after completing four years of high school Spanish to review what I had learned over the past four years. I more or less felt as though I already had a good understanding of basic grammar; however, I wanted to “revisit” some of the things that I had learned and go more “in-depth” with the language. Over the summer between my high school graduation and my first year at college, I read this book cover-to-cover and, by the time I entered college in the fall as a Spanish major, this book had put me light-years ahead of my peers. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on May 8th, 2008.
I read a lot in Spanish and have decided to add a category to this site entitled “Book Reviews” in which I will post information about some of the best “Spanish-related” books that I have read and that I think my readers could be interested in. To kick-off this new section of the site, I’d like to tell you about a book by Spaniard Ramón Sampedro, a man with a tremendous will… to die. Continue reading this post…
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