Sant Jordi has once again overflowed Catalonia with the magic formula that never fails: books for all tastes —from the exquisite Nobel laureate Han Kang to young authors in love with success, such as Gil Pratsobrerroca, David Uclés and Inma Rubiales—, roses at prices ranging from 4 to 25 euros, and the contagious enthusiasm of millions of citizens who have taken to the streets ready to have a good time.

There are people who buy a book for Sant Jordi to give to someone who never reads any books, which is like me being given a ticket to go see Formula 1. There are people who lament that there are people who buy books for Sant Jordi who then don't read them. But how many of us don't have books from previous years piling up that we haven't opened yet? There are people who want the celebration to be perfect. But perfection is a theoretical concept.

How many lives can a book have? In Celrà, straddling Girona and Empordà, for 16 years a recycled reading project has been beating, giving a new life to more than 300,000 books. It shares space with the town library in the old Pagans Factory, a gem of Catalan industrial modernism converted into a municipal space, where the Town Hall coexists with the municipal swimming pools, the library, the music school, art school, and a civic center with a bar and restaurant, and a free indoor play area for children and babies.

The definitive impulse to start writing, a self-confidence therapy, the stimulus to tell that story that is kept in a corner of the soul or a creative activity for an active retirement. The students of the Vicenç Pagès Jordà Writing Room of the Girona City Council are as diverse and heterogeneous as the motivations that have led them to want to write. But all of them, despite their different origins, ages or abilities, are touched by the same passion for writing. And for reading! Since the founder of the school, the late writer from Figueres Vicenç Pagès, did not conceive of one activity without the other.

"Don't you have a smaller or thinner one, so it doesn't weigh too much to read in bed?" Beyond literary quality, book format, or other publishing specifics, a book's length can push us towards or against buying it. A study of 2,500 bestsellers from the New York Times revealed a few years ago that the average number of pages had grown from 320 in 1999 to 400 in 2014. Is there a similar pattern with books originally written in Catalan? If we take a look at almost 5,000 narrative and essay books originally published in Catalan in recent decades, the trend is confirmed: books in Catalan (including those released simultaneously in another language) are getting longer.

Sant Jordi's Day. As is tradition, the streets of Catalonia become a hive of books, roses, and senyeras. And, in the midst of the great celebration of reading, a genre that tries to make a space for itself is politics: leaders often swap the lectern for the pen to fix their narrative or explain their "truth". Below, we analyze the list of titles that have been most purchased in recent years (since 2018), based on data provided by the publishing sector consulted by ARA, with a predominance of titles linked to the Procés.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal said that we can all be sculptors of our own brain, referring to its enormous plasticity and how, with our actions, we can shape it. In this sense, surely one of the most powerful chisels is reading. Under the pretext of the quintessential day for book lovers, we propose five publications to grow and shape gray matter: memoirs, written with humor, about the passion for mathematics; a collection of ideas, reflections, and thoughts from who is surely one of the pivotal minds of the 21st century; an ode to the brain and its enormous capacity to rebuild, reconfigure, and remodel itself through breathing and meditation; the experience of nine women working and living together for a few days on a Martian station; and, finally, a journey through the history of medicine and humanity to dismantle, forever, the myths and biases that have surrounded women's mental health. Neither crazy nor hysterical.

The Catalan Book Chamber published this Monday the list of best-selling books in the week before Sant Jordi in fiction, non-fiction, and children's and young adult books, both in Catalan and Spanish. As usual, new releases are climbing to the top positions.

The yellow, the green, and the red are bursting all over the country. The pledge we had to pay this foggy and rainy winter had a reward: the colors are vivid, saturated, and the sun, which is already organizing the first summer drills, makes everything shine as if visitors were to come. With the white background that still holds in the Pyrenees, one has the impression of walking through the awakened and rich country of the poet.

Fantasy books, mystery books, dystopian stories, personal diaries, and traditional tales with block letters, cursive letters, or print letters. And sagas, many sagas. Students from Institut Escola Sant Felip Neri in Barcelona, aged 4 to 15, have recommended their favorite books to us, as well as those that once opened the door to the enjoyment of reading. These are their recommendations for this Sant Jordi.

After hearing Carles Rabassa's undeniable speech at the Catalan Literature Night, I bought his Prometeu de mil maneres (Univers Llibres) out of solidarity and curiosity. I found a solid, sharp, dense novel that directly hits the universal chord of the contrast between who we are and the character that, as Martí i Pol would say, we put on like a sweater or a tie when we go out on the street. All from Palma and from a linguistic, political, and cultural position that reviews, without concessions, like the speech, the state of affairs in this “society of tiredness,” as Han calls it.

Her name is Sara Cohen, she is a doctor specializing in brain disorders and she is tired of keeping the secret. The author of the literary saga "The Maid", which has sold millions of books worldwide, has become one of the most impactful best-sellers in recent years and has had a homonymous film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, has revealed her true identity to the American newspaper USA Today". Until now, Cohen was hiding behind the pseudonym Freida McFadden. "I'm at a point in my career where I'm tired of this being a secret, of people debating whether I'm a real person or if I'm three men. I have nothing to hide," says the writer. The revelation comes shortly before the publication of the next book, "Dear Debbie" (in Catalan by Rosa dels Vents), and the confirmation of the second film of "The Maid", which Sweeney will once again star in.

Your favorite book, the one that completely captivated you, made you reflect, moved you, amused you, or allowed you to escape the worries around you... and perhaps one you've already recommended to your partner or a friend, you can recommend it to readers this Sant Jordi.

When Hitler committed suicide, he had sixteen thousand books. Currently, about 1,300 are preserved in the United States, between the Library of Congress and that of Brown University. They are books underlined and with his annotations in the margins of the pages. What does a person's library say about its owner? This is the question that the documentary The Books Hitler Didn't Burn aims to answer, which Channel 33 broadcast on Wednesday night. It's worth recovering it from the 3Cat platform. Produced by German public television and the Arte channel, it delves into Hitler's book collection with Timothy Ryback, the world's leading expert on his library. Hitler was a great reader and knowledgeable about European literature and the history of science. But in no way does the documentary try to investigate his tastes. The documentary asks more ambitious questions: what do these books tell us about the origin of Hitler's murderous ideas? What do they tell us about the current far-right?Hitler preserved publications that Nazism had burned. Also revealed are all the businessmen who gifted the genocidal dictator with books and left the trace of their dedications. From a guide to Berlin written by a Jewish cultural critic to a vegetarian cookbook, passing through a treatise on urban heating systems and a manual on how to improve cigar factories.Hitler has often been considered an ideologue, but the documentary shows how the dictator fed on cultural currents of the time that extended beyond Germany and influenced many other leaders and their immigration laws. The documentary recovers the underlined passages from Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen; Fire and Blood, by Ernst Jünger, or The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, among other titles. The text is juxtaposed with archival footage of Hitler and Nazism, and the result is very impactful. It is sickening to discover how some of the ideas that emerge from Hitler's library connect with current discourses by Vox or Aliança Catalana. The documentary shows how some of these books are still used by far-right criminals. It also explains the origin of the replacement theory and how Nazism used it.But the documentary is not limited to an exercise in memory: it highlights how current media are repeating the strategy. It delves into books that talk about eugenics, analyzes antisemitic literature with experts, and highlights the texts that Hitler read before launching the genocide. The ideas contained in Hitler's three great libraries, in Berlin, Munich, and his Alpine residence, are still chilling today. The Books Hitler Didn't Burn is not a look at the past but at our present to demonstrate how all his theses were already there before Hitler. And how they still endure.

Vermuts Miró is the subject of the first volume in the Business History Library, a project launched by MaserGrup. The book, written by historian Isabel Martínez (Cambrils, 1973), traces the evolution of Vermuts Miró from its founding in 1914 to its acquisition by MaserGrup in 2020, placing the brand's trajectory within the broader history of wine production. The book will be presented on April 7th at Casa Navàs.

The journalist Mar Bermúdez (Barcelona, ​​1998) goes report your boss in The MainThe former director of Catalunya Ràdio, Saúl Gordillo, was arrested in December 2022 for sexual assault. A case that would end in sentencing Two years later. And in 2025, Gordillo agreed to a sentence of one and a half years in prison for the sexual assault of a second female employee of the media outlet he directed in 2022. The MainNow Bermúdez recounts the experience he had in The sins of a feminist: the awakening of a journalistic #MeToo movement (Ara Llibres), a book that narrates, from a feminist perspective and with a structure based on the seven deadly sins, what it means to denounce a powerful person with influential friends. Which is the worst deadly sin?

A claw, a chair, a laundry paddle, a plume, a printing press, a dress, an urn, or a corset. These are some of the 25 objects that journalist Sílvia Marimon Molas, Culture Editor at ARA, has featured in the book Inventory of silenced stories (Eumo Editorial), an essential and highly educational journey through everyday objects that have been crucial in shaping our society today. Objects that Marimon links to both renowned and anonymous women who have too often been forgotten in history books.

When they told him that The Sleeping Garden (Univers/Espasa) fit perfectly among the novels of healing fiction (Healing fiction), Carla Gracia Mercadé (Barcelona, ​​1980) didn't know much about what she was being told. "I wrote the book I needed, a refuge I went into when things were bad," the writer explains. Evocative and full of beauty, Gracia's fifth novel is the story of a woman living on autopilot with a latent grief until she goes to the Empordà to awaken a dormant garden. Iris will find in the plants a home and a peace of incalculable value, but to get there she will have to decide who she wants to be.