Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

This collection of poetry has some really beautiful and memorable moments. The poems are all short, but they're well worth reading. The collection moves from the joys and excitements of young love to the sadness and despair of love's end. I especially enjoyed "Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche," which as its title implies comes near the end of the collection.

Los Días Enmascarados by Carlos Fuentes

This collection of short stories is small but dense. I found the Spanish in the six stories difficult, but the stories intriguing. They strike me as Borgesian: statues come to life, gardens in old houses are actually in different places, and so forth. Things aren't as they initially seem. I'm not sure if an English translation is available.

Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas by Doris Sommer

This book explores gaps and lacunae in various American texts. Sommer makes a case for reading difficulties in the text as signs of particularity that should be respected instead of as something to be deconstructed and then pushed right over. Rather than the modernist difficulties that showed the reader that his or her work was valuable, these difficulties mark moments when readers ought to realize their status as outsiders. Sommer gives a number of different types of gaps and not telling. I thought her most effective chapters were on Beloved and translation and court cases. I would have liked a conclusion that tied things together more effectively in the end, but in some senses, that might be a lacuna of its own necessary to this text.

Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa

This book is a hodge-podge of forms and ideas. In its mixtures of form (essays, poetry, history, memoir, and myth are forms that come most immediately to mind) and of languages (English, Spanish, and Nahautl) it both demonstrates the problems of living in the borderlands and starts to demonstrate ways that we--by code-switching, by listening, by acceptance--can live best. I particularly liked the sections on the borderlands and on language. Anzaldúa doesn't hold any punches, and a working knowledge of Spanish will help the reader.

Puntos de Partida Workbook by Alice Arana

I found this workbook better than the textbook it accompanies. The exercises provided rigorous review of grammatical points, and the mi diario sections, among others, encouraged me to write prose of my own, which constituted an important part of learning the language for me.

Puntos de Partida by Marty Knorre

I disliked this textbook. Partially, the problem was that I am learning Spanish primarily to read the literature, and not to speak it necessarily, while the book was geared toward speaking skills and aural comprehension. Far more problematic, though, was its presentation of verbs: there is not an overview first, so it feels like one thing after another being thrown at you with no rhyme or reason. Generally, I wasn't pleased with the organization of each chapter, either. I would especially warn self-teachers away from this book.

English Grammar for Students of Spanish by Emily Spinelli

I found this grammar book practically useless. It is designed to supplement Spanish textbooks and fill in any gaps in the student's English grammar. Unfortunately, it only covers the most basic topics of grammar. Often its explanations for how to identify grammatical elements in Spanish are only "the same as in English." I would have preferred to buy a Spanish grammar rather than dallying around with this waste of time, money, and paper.