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Recommendations by participants in HTLAL's Super Challenge

Please, no spoilers! Comments as to difficulty level, pages/minutes, etc. are welcome. No * as first character.

Resources:

Esta Noche Libros is a whole web page full of people talking about books in Spanish
America Reads Spanish is an organization whose aim is to increase the use of and reading of Spanish in the US.

Contemporary Literature

Cover Title Comments Thumbs Up
Zafon El principe de la niebla by Zafon It is not hard and the beginning looks promising (and reviews claim
the rest to be great).
Cavesa
Eduardo Mendoza they have a lot of more comical novels, if you want something a bit more light-hearted you might consider checking them out. Crush
Gabriel García Márquez some of it was hit or miss for me, but i really loved Cien años de soledad and enjoyed other novels like El general no tiene quien le escriba, El otoño del patriarca, and Relato de un náufrago (Crush). Cien años de soledad is one of my all-time favorites, and I have read it and listened to it several times. (Mork the Fiddle) Crush, Mork the Fiddle
Jesús Fernández Santos i especially enjoyed their short stories (in particular Cabeza rapada), but enjoyed some of their novels too, like Los Bravos and Extramuros Crush
Miguel Delibes the two books that stick out the most for me are Los santos inocentes and El príncipe destronado, but i'm sure there's a treasure trove of stuff within Delibes' works Crush
Isabel Allende i really can't recommend Eva Luna enough, i thought it was great. They also have books written for "adolescents" which might be worth looking into, too. Crush
Max Aub "El laberinto mágico" was really interesting, a series of six (large) novels following the Spanish Civil War from all sorts of angles and viewpoints. Crush
Ramón J. Sender i think a lot of you would enjoy reading "La tesis de Nancy". It's a pretty funny story about a grad student who goes to Spain to write their thesis. It's pretty funny and i really enjoyed the characters, especially the gypsy Curro. Réquiem por un campesino español was also interesting, but its contents are a bit heavier than La tesis de Nancy Crush
Benito Pérez Galdós i found some of the novels a bit dry, but Misericordia was really moving to the point of at times seeming exasperatingly heartless. Crush

Classic Literature

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Nonfiction

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Poetry

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Works in Translation

Cover Title Comments Thumbs Up
Hunger Games The book is written almost entirely in the first person singular present tense which makes it very accessible to beginning students.

The vocabulary is pretty rich, and will require consulting the dictionary frequently at first, but there won't be any "mystery verbs" you can't figure out. Aside from the occasional (vosotros) imperative or subjunctive (both rare) it's all first person singular or plural present tense. It's 384 pages, but the story is engaging and the pages go quickly even for a beginner.

fiziwig
Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" tetralogy in translation. I found the Spanish translation much easier to read than the English original or German translation. If you like fantasy, this might be a good start. Bao
Las Cronicas de Narnia I read part of the first book in 5th grade, so it isn't that hard to read. Michael K., Serpent, RMM
C.S. Lewis’s sci-fi Space Trilogy for adults,  Más allá del Planeta Silencioso I really enjoyed the book and would definitely recommend it to others, although it is decidedly more difficult to read than Lewis’s Narnia books. RMM
Una princesa de Marte), the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. This is a fun piece of pulp science-fiction from the early twentieth century. It’s both easy to read and keeps one’s interest up with adventure and suspense. It’s also in the public domain and free online. RMM
Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (Egidio, el granjero de Ham). It’s short, though, so it would only count as half a book, and it really isn't at the same level as  [and is easier than] The Hobbit. RMM
Entrevista con el vampiro by Anne Rice. It is a bit more difficult but doable
for an intermediate.
Cavesa

Books for Kids and Tweens

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Films

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TV and Telenovelas

Title Year Comments Thumbs Up
La Casa De Papel 2017- Pretty popular new Spanish drama on netflix. Most of the language is relatively understandable, and the slang is repetitive so you pick it up. VERY bingeable. picklelanguage

Audio and Podcasts

Title Year Comments Thumbs Up
News in Slow Spanish http://www.newsinslowspanish.com/catalog/spanish-expressions-proverbs/

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