Any MFL teachers here - need recommendations for reading?!

[Anonname22]

My DS is applying for MFL at Uni and needs to do some super-curricular reading in Spanish to boost his personal statement. Knowing he doesn’t like literature, his teachers have recommended short stories by Julio Cortazar or Jorge Luis Borges. From browsing on Amazon, they all look really hard though! Can anyone please advise if there are some that are more accessible for a year 12 student (predicted B in Spanish) that would look good on personal statement? TIA

Read them in English?! They’re all out there. Or look for parallel texts? Cortazar and Borges are hard going, even in English to be fair. Has he been told he needs to read? I would suggest regular newspaper reading on current affairs in The SpanIsh speaking world would be useful, coupled with copious Netflix viewing in Spanish (Google for suggestions - Money Heist is enjoyable - watch in Spanish with Spanish subtitles rather than English ones).

Thanks @Changechangechanging. He just asked his Spanish teacher what he should be doing beyond the curriculum and they mentioned those two authors. DS assumed they meant he should read in Spanish but they look so hard so maybe the teacher didn’t?

Is he looking to go to Oxbridge? I wouldn’t advise many A level students to try literature alone - it’s hard going. The news is way more accessible and more relevant to their A Level studies which is what you are trying to supplement. By all means try Borges and Cortazar - both an acquired taste in different ways. Or just see if you can find a pdf of some of their work and push it through lingro which makes things easier when reading in another language.

So try this. PDF of Ficciones by Borges here: https://ddooss.org/libros/Jorge_Luis_Borges_ficciones.pdf

If you then put that we address into lingro.comm(1 on the home page) tell it Spanish to English, it will reproduce the pdf for you but every single word in it will be clickable and you will get a definition of that word when you click. Stops you having to go backwards and forwards to a dictionary. And the added bonus of it costing nothing at all!

Have a look at what the unis he wants to apply for suggest.

What about Zafon? DS really enjoyed his books. Some are for adults and some YA.

Also, films ...Pans Labyrinth, Almodovar films, Motorcycle Diaries.

When I did my A Level Spanish we read Gabriel Garcia Marquez books. I also bought the English versions and still have them all now.

I think they were called "El colonel no tiene que escribe" (Nobody writes to the colonel) and something else I will remember in a mo!

The other book was called "Cronica de una muerta anunciada" (Chronicle of a death foretold).