I Started a Book Club. Kinda.

I started a local 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 and 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 different.…