A kind of beatification weighs on books by which it is believed that a book, simply because it is that, a book, is beneficial, a symptom and synonym of good and laudable things.
As if the stuffed and armed or the mere noun filters and eliminates all those ideas, stigmas, prejudices that can be counterproductive for a person who consumes it.
From this belief come the invitations to read that tell us that you have to read whatever, but you have to read. An idea widely disseminated in schools, publishers and, of course, by influencers and booktobers who, with the refrain of “don’t be class-minded and let people read what they want” or “all books are magic” recommend any reading.
To think in this way is to ignore the very history of books, to mutilate them and reduce them to a single purpose.
The maximum verb of our civilization and that governs almost all our time and decisions is entertainment. We are always looking for sources of entertainment and we have turned art into that: a source of entertainment. Therefore, as long as a book entertains it is good. Reading as a synonym for entertaining, but no, reading should not only be a source of pleasure, reading should -sometimes- cost effort and mean a challenge, as it costs and means everything worthwhile in this world.
The books are more than that. Their condition as pariahs and ideological enemies that have been tied to them for years by all the tyrannies and dictatorships of history are a clear sign that books are more than an instrument for entertainment.
Beyond the well-known examples of Nazi Germany that, when it came to power, burned and prohibited the reprinting of 25,000 volumes for being considered “non-Aryans”. The history of Latin America is littered with examples of how books are a vehicle for leading the formation of entire peoples. Castro’s Cuba censored hundreds of artists and their works for considering them anti-revolutionary and the creations of ideological deviants who did not deserve to be read and represent a danger to the emergence of the new man. The military schools in Peru that prohibited the reading of the city and the dogs arguing that they lacked the honor of the institution, when what it did was show the corruption and violence that prevailed within. In Nicaragua, authors such as Sergio Ramírez have been censored for being considered enemy works of the government, when in reality they are works that exposed the government.
A book is an instrument that shapes you, but also deforms you. That can push you in any direction. A book is valid for its content, not for the fact that it is a book.
Normally there is applause when someone starts reading, even if they start doing so with titles that can be considered of little or no erudition, because it is believed that they will eventually move on to look for better readings, but whoever gives that applause is because they see Yordi Rosado in the person who is reading. , Farid Dieck, Daniel Habif or Robert Kiyosakli his own history and experience because he also started that way. He is unaware that not everyone has the same capacity for discernment, nor the same commitment to their training, much less prior training that will lead them to seek better readings.
Like all human creation, the book can be an instrument for construction or destruction. A wrong book in the hands and in the wrong conscience represents a danger. My fight read by someone with no discernment or knowledge of history can birth a new fan.
Normally in this debate there are always self-help books (which are among the most widely read in Mexico) and they are validated based on that idea: you have to read whatever, but you have to read. They are generally validated by people who don’t read them. If someone with discernment and reading experience read them, they would find meaning in what Baricco says: “we are forming a civilization that does not seem capable of withstanding the shock wave of reality (…) will it not end up producing generations incapable of resisting the reversals of fate or even the mere inevitable violence of any fate? Based on training light skills [el pensamiento mágico propio de los libros de autoayuda] —one begins to think— we are losing the muscular strength necessary for the melee with reality”.
Whoever validates all types of reading ignores the diversity of contexts and realities. A young man from any town besieged by backwardness and drug trafficking who reads Roberto Kiyosaki for whom he believes that his reality will change only by decreeing it, he simply will not be better off, nor will he be more aware, nor will he find more resources than reading to tell everything by Jeremias Gamboa, the city and the dogs by Vargas Llosa or Balún Canan by Rosario Castellanos.
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