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Carme Riera. Cap al cel obert

A nice historical novel about a woman who goes from Cuba to Mallorca to accompany her sister, who is supposed to marry their cousin Miquel, a dissolute libertine. The younger sister who is supposed to marry Miquel dies in passage, and the older sister is sick and has not yet told the family that she is NOT the younger sister, as they all assume she is.

My 100 novel blog project is at the service of my reading knowledge of reading knowledge of 8 languages project. Two kinds of learning take place as I read in Catalan: the purely mechanical practice of reading what I already know, making that second nature, and the gradual assimilation of new words and grammatical forms. My Catalan is one step further along than my Italian.

The 8 languages will be

English / Spanish / Portuguese / French / Catalan / Italian / German / Euskara

(listed in order of current reading knowledge)

Dante distinguished three Romance languages, basically Italian, French, and Occitan. Castilian had not yet emerged as a strong enough vernacular in written form for him to recognize it. I'm assuming I'll be fine in Occitan with Catalan as the basis, and that Galego is basically Portuguese.