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Spanish books for B2

At B2 grammar no longer stops you. What stops you is rare words, local turns of phrase and long descriptions. The books on this shelf can be read by translating single words, without a dictionary on every line.

B2

52 books

The level's books side by side

The catalog measures two things: the average sentence length and the share of long words, 9 letters or more. At B2 sentences run from 6-9 words in the plays and dialogue novels, The Maidens’ Consent, Don Juan Tenorio, The Trickster of Seville, Damned for Despair, Bohemian Lights and Galdós’s The Grandfather, and 11-12 in Life Is a Dream, Gypsy Ballads and Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez to 30 in Martí’s The Golden Age, 32 in Bécquer’s Legends and 34 in Pereda’s Peñas arriba. A long word comes from one in 22 in The Golden Age to just under one in ten in Doña Perfecta; at C1 it comes one in ten or more often. In verse the numbers say little: Calderón’s, Tirso’s and Lorca’s difficulty lies in old syntax and imagery, and Martín Fierro’s in gaucho speech. Several books are uneven, and each book’s page shows where the text gets harder.

How these books read in MovaReader

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Before you read

Are these adaptations or complete texts?

Complete texts, not abridged or adapted. Forty-nine are originals in Spanish, from Rojas’s La Celestina (1499) to Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads (1928); three are old Spanish translations: Dumas’s The Corsican Brothers (1912), Ovid’s The Art of Love (an anonymous 1821 prose version) and De Amicis’s Heart (an anonymous version published in Mexico in 1925). Bécquer’s Legends follow a 1912 edition of twelve legends.

Which B2 book should I start with?

It depends on what slows you down. In prose the shortest sentences are in Abel Sánchez, 12 words, and in Mist and Aunt Tula, 13 (the verse books measure shorter still, but verse is not easier); the fewest long words are in The Golden Age, one in 22, though its sentences are long. The shortest books are Gypsy Ballads and Coloma’s Ratón Pérez, about an hour each, and the longest Fortunata and Jacinta, 66-109 hours.

Is there Latin American Spanish here?

Yes. Quiroga wrote in Argentina, and his stories use Río de la Plata words such as porotos (beans) or locro (a thick corn stew). Mist was written in Spain, the Dumas translation was published in Barcelona, and the Ovid translation in Madrid. Jungle Tales is set in the Misiones jungle and names its animals with local words such as yacaré and coatí, and Martí wrote The Golden Age in New York for the children of Latin America. Hernández’s Martín Fierro is the national poem of Argentina, written in the speech of the gauchos. Isaacs’s María is set in the Cauca valley of Colombia.

How is B2 different from C1 in this catalog?

In vocabulary. At C1 a long word, 9 letters or more, comes one in ten or more often; at B2 less often, at most just under one in ten, in Doña Perfecta. Sentence length alone does not set the boundary: The Art of Love at B2 has 18 words per sentence, and The Lady of the Camellias at C1 has 17.

What if B2 is still hard for me?

Start with the B1 shelf: classic novels retold in Spanish in all the tenses, 11-12 words per sentence. Below it, the A1 and A2 shelves hold fairy tales, fables and simpler retellings.