Biblioteca Chat

Every Tuesday at 9 PM, when Radio Onda Latina starts playing boleros from the 50s, someone always cracks the same joke: "It smells like freshly brewed coffee and yellowed pages in here". That was the first thing Dani read when she stumbled into this room by mistake three years ago, looking for the anime room. She came from a literature forum that had closed without notice, and here she found something better: people who didn't just talk about books, but also about the pirated edition of *One Hundred Years of Solitude* that circulated in the 90s, the smell of university photocopies, or that copy of *Hopscotch* someone left behind in a Lavapiés bar. Dani came back because, amidst free verse and debates about whether Cortázar was a snob or a genius, someone recommended *The Savage Detectives* and hit the nail on the head. Now she logs in from her phone on the metro, with her headphones on to listen to the radio in the background while she types.

Conversations here aren't by the book. Yesterday they discussed whether *The Tunnel* by Sábato is an existentialist novel or a manual for applied psychopathy, and someone said: "It's Tinder for loners, but 20th-century style". On Sunday afternoons, when things slow down, questions pop up like "Has anyone read *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* in Czech?" or "Where can I find a pocket edition of *Don Quixote* that won't fall apart when I open it?". There's dark humor — "If Borges and Bukowski got drunk together, what would they write? A haiku about the death of the fax" — and heated debates: the eternal "Is *The Name of the Rose* a novel or a crossword puzzle for philologists?". There's also practical help: "I need a short poem about rain for a girl who's going to Paris", and in less than ten minutes you have three options, from Neruda to a micro-story by Monterroso. The weird thing is that someone asks a question and doesn't get an answer.

What makes this room unique is that people don't pretend. If a book bored you, you say so without beating around the bush: "I fell asleep on page 47 of *Ulysses* and dreamed that Joyce was chasing me with a dictionary". There's a bot called *LibroAzar* that every Friday at 11 PM throws out a random title — from *Les Misérables* to a washing machine repair manual — and you have to come up with a two-line comment on the spot. Veterans have their quirks: *@LectorDeNoche* always recommends Russian classics with the same message ("Dostoevsky, but read it in winter, with a tea that cools down on the table"), and *@PoetaCallejero* only speaks in loose verse when they've had three drinks too many. There's also the unwritten tradition of the "cursed book": every month someone proposes a book that nobody's finished (the record is held by *In Search of Lost Time*, with 12 confirmed abandonments) and it's voted on whether it deserves another chance. The room has memory: if you mention *The Confederacy of Dunces*, someone will bring up the day that *@Bibliotecaria* got angry because they confused Ignatius J. Reilly with a character from *The Simpsons*.

To join, just connect to ChatZona (irc.chatzona.com), choose a nickname — although the regulars will give you a new one within two days — and join #Chat_Biblioteca. No registration required, nor