Booked up

April has rolled around again, and with it comes the equally re­cur­rent Sant Jordi's Day (the 23rd) on which peo­ple all over Cat­alo­nia give red roses and books to those they love, be it pla­ton­i­cally, through kin­ship or stirred by pure lust (the rose tra­di­tion goes back to the 15th cen­tury, and the book one, to 1929). Un­like the major book fes­ti­vals, such as those in Lon­don and Frank­furt – busi­ness-only events in which writ­ers are seen more as a nui­sance than a boon – Sant Jordi's Day is one long tryst be­tween both local and in­ter­na­tional au­thors and their read­ers, with dozens upon dozens of the for­mer chat­ting with and sign­ing for hun­dreds of thou­sands of the lat­ter. Sant Jordi is also a fi­nan­cial shot in the arm for the pub­lish­ing in­dus­try here, which is just as well given that in the last two years, book sales in Cat­alo­nia – be they elec­tronic or on paper, and in any lan­guage - have gone down 43%. This cat­a­stro­phe (no other word fits the bill) is partly ex­plained by the fact that – ac­cord­ing to El País - the grow­ing num­bers of un­em­ployed cit­i­zens es­chew book­shops for free pub­lic li­braries, for ob­vi­ous rea­sons. But the core prob­lem, says El País, is that four out of every ten Cata­lans don't read any books at all. Per­son­ally, I don't find that too un­usual. Al­though for years I've been read­ing a fair amount, I laid off the print for months when I was about 19, be­liev­ing that lit­er­a­ture had been turned by Eng­land's upper-mid­dle (aka 'chat­ter­ing') classes into merely an­other spe­cious token of their sup­posed so­cial su­pe­ri­or­ity. What is for sure is that not all books are to every­one's taste, no mat­ter how hyped and awarded: a novel by one Nobel prize win­ning au­thor ir­ri­tated me so much that half way through I felt the urge to jump up and down on it. And with very few ex­cep­tions, I find genre fic­tion (noir, pseudo-me­dieval fan­tasy, S&M...) about as in­ter­est­ing as tele­vised snooker. Non-fic­tion on po­ten­tially in­ter­est­ing sub­jects writ­ten by ex­perts strait-jack­eted by aca­d­e­mic jar­gon has me reach­ing for the bot­tle. And of the 20 best-sell­ing ti­tles on Ama­zon there is ex­actly one I would read – but only if you paid me to. Read­ing, then, is highly sub­jec­tive, but the sheer va­ri­ety of ti­tles means that every­one– cur­rent non-read­ers in­cluded– can find at least some­thing that's right for them. The ques­tion, then, is how best to con­nect po­ten­tial read­ers with 'their' books. Abol­ish­ing mis­lead­ing best-seller lists and ap­par­ently pres­ti­gious prizes might be a good start.