Clive James, a wonderful literary critic and a polyglot, has excellent suggestions for you, my friend.
- Read Borges.
His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least.
2. It’s best to choose essays as your first serious reading matter in the language.
Memo to any student making a raid on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.
3. Here’s the actual method:
Read an essay a day, underline every word you don’t know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards.
If you aren’t ready to tackle actual essays, there are collections of very simple stories you can get on Kindle. Get one and start from the most basic story, using the method outlined above. You learn to speak by speaking and to read by reading. If you goal is to read in a language, then read a bit every day.
And one more quote from James because it’s very beautiful:
When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naive. But it was when we were still naive that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection.
Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable.
Muchísima suerte y que lo pases bien en el proceso, compañero.
Clarissa's Blog 
Wonderful, Prof. Clarissa, thanks for the recommendations! I was the person who asked the question, and I have no knowledge of Spanish at all, although I have some background in Romance languages (French, Italian, Latin). Is there any textbook or other resource you might particularly recommend for getting up to the level of being able to read simple stories or essays? I haven’t found Duolingo helpful because of its slow, inductive approach to grammar and its focus on conversational vocabulary.
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With background in these languages, I don’t think you need a textbook. Try something like this and see if you understand based on your existing knowledge:
https://a.co/d/1K8liH8
Try it and see how it goes.
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It is amazing!
Your original posting to the question caused me to do an AI question/search using ChatGPT and it gave me a number of recommendations for learning to read Spanish. I chose one and read the first chapter.
I then came back to your posting and found this Comment and clicked on the link that you provided and guess what? That is the book that I had selected!
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Hah! That’s really cool!
Good luck, I hope it works.
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“or other resource you might particularly recommend for getting up to the level of being able to read”
Add some Spanish language newspapers to your twitter feed. Just look at the headlines as they appear and try to read them and then use the translate function to see how close you are. When you don’t need to translate them anymore have a look at the articles (at least the parts not behind pay walls).
I’d recommend using papers from the same country in the beginning.
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