Like every year, my passion for reading and the obligations of work have led me to visit La Setmana del Llibre en Català more than once. It must be said, first of all, that the current location at Moll de la Fusta (an imposition arising from the pandemic that has placed the festival in a much less busy and active place than Plaça de la Catedral) has become a success; the space is much more comfortable for the fair's 84 stands and its 259 exhibitors, and above all even more practical when it comes to scheduling a high-stress agenda, with 300 activities and some 150 presentations of new literary works.
Walking through La Setmana, any reader in our language ends up experiencing a mixed feeling of pride and dread, because it demonstrates the very high quality of our publishing industry (with essay and thought catalogs like Adesiara's, for example, which any first-world publisher would envy), but also because you end up wondering if we have enough readers to digest such a rich publishing system with an authentically frantic dose of new releases.
Yours truly has the misfortune of being Catalan, which entails living between the most radical euphoria and mourning, and I cannot help but feel a certain vertigo when contemplating so many piles of books with a rather mournful destiny. I wish all crises were of abundance, and I insist that (despite the whiners who declare the Catalan language dead) the country's publishers continuously demonstrate that Catalonia has a literature that has the usual virtues ---and defects--- of any European country.
But our tribe is also specialized in doing the most difficult things well and messing up the most basic ones, and my gut tells me that the excellence demonstrated in La Setmana does not quite square with the current percentages of reading in Catalan. According to the latest study by the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC) on the matter, Reading habits and book purchases in 2021, only 33.8% of the country's citizens regularly read in Catalan (the definition of the adverb is important, as it includes bipeds who read weekly or, at least, once a month).
If the figure of 33.8% is already rather meager, even more so is a highly problematic periodicity, because to qualify as habitual a person who reads two or three times during four weeks (without specifying the hours) I would say is overly optimistic. These figures should be contextualized with factors such as the progressive general tendency to read more and more texts on screen (whether one likes it or not, the light of a phone does not dispose our brain with the same level of attention as a page), the progressive trivialization of reading in primary education or even in university studies and, I insist, a publishing system with a stress of new releases and books of high interest that not even a hyperactive robot could keep up with. For appearances, publishers put on happy faces (the same study says that book buyers at least once throughout the year remain at 64.7% of citizens), but when you chat with them sotto voce they tell how they are fatigued by publishing new releases that will have only a few hundred readers.
We have a publishing system with a stress of new releases and books of high interest that not even a hyperactive robot could keep up withI think it would be worth asking honestly, without triumphalism or an excess of martyrology, who reads books in Catalan in the country. Yours truly is guided by intuition (also by the fact of hosting a weekly podcast of books in Catalan and devouring more than a hundred books in our language every year, of all genres), and my nose tells me that we are not doing very well. You will accuse me, rightly, of uttering very vague speculations, but experience tells me that statistics are often much more inaccurate than factors such as the public and media conversation that books provoke in a territory. And if I embrace my perception of this second factor, I feel like throwing myself from the Moll promenade directly into the water. When La Setmana ends, administrations and publishers will sing hallelujahs; and they will be right, because it is a forty-year-old event that has become a magnificent gateway to the literary season. But this is one side of the coin, and our tribe often falls into the tendency of not wanting to look at the reverses.
Given the panorama, yours truly will continue with his liberal and modest pretension of setting an example, and I will maintain the individual ethic of burning my eyes with the tons of new and excellent books that await us. Read one, I beg you, because despite the triumphalism there is still not a single writer in the country who can live exclusively from what they publish in Catalan.
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