I Started a Spanish Book Club. Kinda.

I started a Spanish book club. Kinda. There are no meetings. No reading schedule. No folding chairs arranged in a circle. Nobody has to finish a chapter before Tuesday. It started with two books. They were books I had already read in English, enjoyed enough to think about afterward, and eventually written reviews of for my website. They had given me something useful, which is probably the highest compliment I can give a book. ## Finding Spanish Books in Yucatán Then I discovered Spanish editions at a local bookshop here in Yucatán. I bought them for a friend because I thought he would actually read them. More importantly, I thought he might get something from them. When I gave him the first book, he asked me to sign and date it. That surprised me. I hadn’t written the book, after all. He explained that it was a local custom when giving someone a book—a small record of where the book had come from and when it had entered your life. So I signed it. And dated it. Suddenly the book felt…