For more than a decade, a group of book-lovers have traveled together through the pages of works written in the language of Cervantes, Martí, Rulfo and García Márquez. Their appointment is the fourth Tuesday of each month.
What began as a group of friends occasionally gathered to talk about literature formalized with time into meetings in the now defunct Casa del Libro, their meeting place until 2000, when they moved to their current meeting place, Modern Times bookstore on Valencia Street.
These lovers of reading constitute a group of voyagers who immerse themselves in a book, becoming an introspection of the essence of the story they have lived, hated and loved.
“It is a group of reading solidarity,” noted the coordinator of the Spanish Reading Group, Judi Iranyi. “One feels supported in what one reads and one can discuss it; we have camaraderie among us.”
“It is also a way of maintaining contact with my Latin roots,” she added.
The chosen titles are in Spanish and do not correspond to best sellers but follow other criteria. While sometimes the bookstore itself offers the titles, the readers can also propose an author and a title they find interesting to share, reaching a consensus among all to establish a reading calendar.
The books they plan to read in the next three months are Andamios by Mario Benedetti in August, El hombre que amaba a los Perros by Leonardo Papua in September, and Vida feliz de un hombre llamado Esteban by Santiago Gamboa in the October.
“It is more interesting to debate books that one reads and know about different ways of understanding what oneself has read,” noted Batia, a woman of Argentine ancestry that has participated in this literary walk for one year.
An assorted variety of people from different origins and points of view gather in a circle through which different interpretations, multiple literary references and an enthusiasm for literature converge.
Not only people from Latin America attend—Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico—but also people from the U.S. with a lot of interest in Spanish-language literature.
There are veterans who assert they have attended for seven or eight years, but there are also newcomers who started just a year ago, and even someone who is there for the first time.
At each gathering, one reader volunteers to work on an introduction about the author and the book that the group will debate; he or she then presents it in front of the others.
In this particular Odyssey, these enthusiastic voyagers cruise into the immensity of the world that the author offers them to know, to the adventure that the book invites them to enliven. And the voyage drives them to as many different interpretations as pages in the book, which is precisely what motivates this reading group the most. “It’s learning by listening to others’ opinions,” noted Joel Sánchez, a Mexican and regular at these meetings.
Many of the members of the group assert that it is those books that they like the least that generate the most controversy at the time of discussion.
“Each one of us has his or her own background,” said Iranyi. “One person interprets one thing, another something totally different. The important thing is that whoever wants to talk has his or her time and space to do it.”
One of the readers, Jared Marcheldon from Colorado, gave the example of Mario Benedetti’s book La Tregua. For him, ‘truce’ meant a truce between a type of man and God, while for the rest of the group the truce referred to the sentimental relationship between a man and a woman.
In their last meeting in the month of July, the reading group travelled through the pages of the book 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a book that touches the theme of femicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
For some of those attending, the book is a work of art, while others were like, “Alright,” or just simply did not like it. But regardless of the perspective, discussion of the book was pretty intense, full of literary passion.
The ‘Círculo de lectoras y lectores en español’ meets the fourth month of each month at Modern Times bookstore, 888 Valencia Street. For more information visit www.mtbs.com