Best-sellers and Junk-books

These days are specially joyful: there is a lot of people on holidays, celebrating Easter, or not, with traditions like the Spanish processions or the “Mona”, a traditional cake eaten in Catalonia the day after Sunday of Easter. But this year it is very close with Saint George: two festivities almost the same week. And we, who have never before write a post about literature, have decided to write our very first.

Biografías, 2003. Alicia Martin intervention at Palacio Linares Casa De America, Madrid

We want to know how are our followers: do you read only in summer, next to the beach? Or do you read so many books a year that you need to write down a list with your new acquisitions? Do you buy them? Do you borrow them from libraries? Do you give them as a present with hidden meaning? Are books your loyal travel companions? Do you read on the tube, bus, train...? We would like also to have a though not only about how do we read but about what we read. Are we really what we read on the same way it is said we are what we eat? A couple of months ago El Cultural hosted a debate about the existence of high and low literature, various literature levels; and they went as far as to say some books are not literature: the best-sellers. What do you think? Are they literature? Just hobbies? Junk books? Does that really exists? Something with such a low quality we could called it junk? A best-seller is a book that in a shot time gets to a huge audience, usually with addictive stories which, perhaps, are close to banality and with a simplicity in its form. There are always exceptions and books of great literary value had become a selling success – like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose – although the problem maybe is not in the book itself but in the speculative market around it, which is closely connected with the speculative market of art, governed for trends and the rules of supply and demand. The book's culture acts within a merchandising and publicity much savage, with a huge amount of money in the game and other interests. In this humor post it can be seen how, unfortunately, most people don't read or only read best-sellers, so we can always say that what matters, after all, is to at least read something.

Most read books according to http://todayilearned.co.uk

But is that true? The important thing is to read anything? Here I could use my colleague Ricard for a duet pro-against best-sellers, like that that article we did for the blog's anniversary! Clearly there are books with more or less quality, but in what is that based? On the writing or on the conceptualization? The purpose we search in reading is different depending on our mood or the moment of our life we are in. Sometimes we will look for books to feed our soul and reflect about the world and the human being; other times we will want a complex story, or perhaps just an occasional entertainment. After all everything might be ok. Everything? What do you think?

Guiomar Sánchez

@guiomar_sp