Does the Sant Jordi best-seller list make any sense? Is it just a commercial promotion? Criticizing it has become as established a tradition as the fact that it's advertised every year. Highlighting what stands out the most, the top of the pyramid of an unattainable reality, occurs in many areas of life. We don't dedicate ourselves to explaining everyone who plays sports every day; we focus primarily on elite footballers, and within this already small group, we still only talk about a few: right now the best-selling item is Lamine Yamal, right? A non-football fan, how many more Barça players do they know?
What about politics? We don't focus on the grassroots members of political parties, not even second-class parliamentarians or first-class officials, but on the main leaders and rulers. Anyone who doesn't follow political news, apart from Trump—and his list of tariffs—would be interested in the fact that the list of tariffs is not the only one that can be used to describe the current situation. best sellers–What other figures in your government do you have in mind? Beyond President Isla, how many other advisors do you know the names of? We also narrow down politics to the goalscorers.
And what do we do with healthcare? Well, we often focus on the great advances rather than the daily life of a primary care physician, on the great doctors and researchers rather than the orderly, whose work is crucial to saving lives, or on the professionalism of so many nurses. Three-quarters of the same thing happens with education. We echo the results of the brightest students, even though we know the university entrance exams don't exactly reflect what they know, or we give voice to an exceptional and committed teacher who gives us optimism, or to an educator with a global vision who helps us.
Nor are we concerned about the religious life of millions of Catholic believers. In fact, we aren't concerned about it. Because we live in a secularized society and because, in any case, we understand that spirituality, in those who feel it or practice it, is something intimate. We practically only know what the Pope of Rome says, what he thinks, and what he does, who has the power to represent and speak for all Catholics, even though we know that within the Church there is a great variety of sensibilities, and that the Vatican is a hotbed of intrigue. That's why the death of a pope is a global event. Incidentally, Francis was once asked how many people—how many people—worked in the Vatican, and his mischievous response was: "Half." We know little about what these two halves do, or don't do. We are satisfied with the glamour of the pontiff.
In all areas of life, from time to time, we seek a counterpoint, curiosity, we take a look at everyday existence, we try to reflect what is not visible, what is hidden. But even so, it is impossible to reach all the individual lives, all the varied situations, all the hidden realities. Reality is complex and scapole, hence we try to concentrate and catalyze it in a few referents, in a few essential ideas or images or people. It is a perfectly human operation, just as when we reduce a family trip to a few photographs or an entire life to a 150-page memoir or a biopic an hour and a half. One of the books appearing on the best-seller lists this Sant Jordi is The memory of the Catalans, where 135 authors reduce what we are to 1,000 pages. How daring! And what a great job!
It's true: the entire set of best-selling books for Sant Jordi only represent 5% of the day's total sales, but they are the ones who score the goals on an important match day, a sort of final by popular vote. It's not the verdict of critics or the literaryly wounded, it's not Nobel Prize Day—by the way, the Nobel Prizes don't represent the best either—it's not the canon. But somehow the list serves us, it paints a wholesale picture of us, while we all know that alongside these scorers there is a beautiful mosaic of thousands of writers who, through the sum of their works, manage to sift through the meaning of our small lives in detail.
