Please! Any reader in the room?

"Do you have them yet, do you have them yet?" I ask everyone this week. Two books (what a funny and inaccurate verb, considering what it's about) by two authors I love have come out, and I need readers to read them, like me, so I can talk about them.

I don't have a "trusted bookstore," just as I don't have a "trusted wine shop" or a "trusted cheese shop" or a "trusted clothing store." I like books, cheeses, wines, and, in a different way, clothes too much not to frequent all specialized establishments where ---very importantly--- the owners love (and understand) the product they sell as much as their customers. This is simple with books and cheeses. You will hardly find a bookseller or a cheesemonger who doesn't die of pleasure with what they sell and who isn't aware of the novelties.

Sometimes, in wine or clothing stores, you find salespeople who know what they're doing, of course, but who don't share your admiring and surrendered enthusiasm or your mocking indignation at each of the units they display in the window. I buy all the books, bottles of wine, cheeses, and jeans I can. And sometimes I go to try on clothes that I will buy someday and I go to see apartments that I could never afford. In this sense, speaking of clothes, allow me an digression: the store NU#02, which designers Miriam Ponsa, Josep Abril, and Txell Miras shared on Valencia Street, will not reopen and I hope that, when we recover, they can be, again, in Barcelona. The three, from the beginning of the pandemic, started working to help from their sector. The clothes they make are pure art, just as what theatrical costume designers do is art.

Well, on Saturday I went to the Casa Usher bookstore to look for "the material." What I was telling you. I don't have one trusted bookstore, I have many. Because of my profession, I know most of the "restless" bookstores in Catalonia. I go to do reading clubs, presentations or, sometimes, talks about books I like. At Casa Usher, for example, which has a small inner courtyard, I gave a talk about an author, very little read here, who drives me crazy: Dennis Johnson. He died in 2017 without any reviews dedicated to him. Wikipedia says he has influenced the work of Chuck Palahniuk and Scott Snyder. I gave that talk at the bookstore because I shared the love for one of the author's books, Train Dreams (I get goosebumps just writing the title) with the head booksellers. Several readers came to listen to the spiel and then bought the book. I love doing these things.

"The material" I went to look for on Saturday (and I made this joke with the booksellers) were two global novelties: the new book by Emmanuel Carrère and the new one by Kazuo Ishiguro. They are two authors I like for different reasons. I like that they release a book (just as I like when Martin Amis or John Irving release a book) because I like to run to the bookstore to get it and, after reading it, talk to someone with the due excitement. Carrère has accompanied me since The Adversary. If you haven't read anything by him, perhaps this current book, Yoga (Anagrama) won't be as pleasurable for you as it is for unconditional readers. Unconditional readers "know" him, we know he writes non-fiction, we know that in The Kingdom, his previous published book, he used an unbeatable magic trick: by explaining intimate things about himself, ugly things, he then made us enter into the truth of what he wanted to explain about others. That's why Yoga is a story that is understood if you "know" him, and if you haven't read it, I would start with The Adversary or Limonov. And in any case, this book will make a lot of people interested in doing yoga.

As for Ishiguro, I like him in a different way. His book The Remains of the Day (Anagrama) I always, always recommend in all the courses, talks, or meetings with readers that I do. It is a book that serves to understand ---like no other--- the wonders of the first person. I'm sure you know or have heard of the story, because James Ivory made a film in the nineties, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Ishiguro is very wise and when he makes Mister Stevens, the narrator, who is a butler in the English mansion Darlington Hall (with a pro-Nazi owner) speak, you understand that he is deceiving you. He tells you something, but you understand the opposite. It is a very clear example of what we call "the unreliable narrator." Apart from that, Ishiguro, of Japanese origin and a writer in the English language, seems to me to have a "peripheral" vision of the place where he lives. It is he, a "non-Briton," who has written, like no one else, about the quintessential British institution: the butlers.

I have stopped reading for a while to write this and now I'm back to it. Since I have two books and not one, I find myself reading the first one with more anxiety, because I also want to read the second one right away. Booksellers already know this. For them to last me a little longer, I can't go buy everything I'm going to read once a month. I have to go little by little. The same thing happens to me in wine shops.