Diverse Spain: keys to a plural historyby Eduardo Manzano (Review). Look, it turns out that we still don’t have any editorial news, and after my unfortunate foray into TikTok a few weeks ago, I’ve now decided to kill time until mid-September by reading books on subjects other than those I usually review. For example, this magnificent history book whose author explains to us, in a style far removed from academic technicalities, the vast repertoire of identities, territories and cultures (think of Roman Hispania, Al Andalus, the most recent reigns of the homo-Bourbon) who have ended up shaping what we understand by our national consciousness. In short, a diverse identity of which I only distinguish one obvious common cultural trait: it does not matter from which region of this plurinational Spain its writers come, who – at least for literary critics of my ilk – all write equally badly.
The Libertarian’s Pathby Javier Milei (Deusto). I don’t usually read biographies written by crazy politicians either, but last August my brain, probably melted by the heat, was crying out for strong emotions and it found them in this book. book (sic) by Javier Milei. I think it was partly because of the funny side that his character himself strikes me as (let’s see, he is said to practice spiritualism with his deceased dog), partly because of my memory of the editorial controversy that preceded its publication. Do you know what I’m talking about? The publisher had to withdraw the long-awaited autobiography from circulation when they discovered that the president of Argentina was lying on the back of his jacket about his academic career (he was not a graduate of the University of Buenos Aires and the University of California had not made a statement either). he was a doctor) although I know that inflating a literary resume is not at all unusual. Don’t all writers brag about having had precarious jobs in their youth? Or because they come from what only they consider a lower class? Am I not deceiving everyone by telling them that I am an associate professor at the University of Ciudad Real?
The Healthy Bible of MasterChef (Espas). There is a small town in my neighboring province of Albacete, Montealegre del Castillo, which the locals usually call “one of the three lies” (you can see why, right?, and the fact is that the town doesn’t have a mountain either, it’s not cheerful either and it doesn’t have a medieval fortress). Well, something similar could be said about this editorial product launched by RTVE that I arrived at the instigation of my wife and children, who say that I’m “damn lazy” and that at home I should contribute by cooking more. I borrowed it from the library and, from the very title, I saw that it wasn’t far behind the aforementioned town of Albacete in terms of trolling: the book is a recipe book and not a Bible (and even as an atheist it seems sacrilegious to associate such a venerable word with instructions for preparing cracked eggs and ham), healthy It contains quite little (let’s see, the recipes are, but let’s remember that the famous TV show has been criticized for causing enormous mental stress to its contestants until they were forced to give up) and, well, I don’t think it’s written by the MasterChef himself, as its misleading title seems to indicate, but I suppose by a multitude of editorial subordinates who, poor things, don’t even know how to cook.
Maximum madnessby Kentaro Miura (Panini Manga). It’s been a few years now, but I’ve been told that it’s an essential read in a genre – manga – that I proudly don’t know everything about. In addition, this book interests me because you can see that many people who are fans of the genre are losing their minds over this work, including a bookseller named Fernando Iglesias Acuña, completely deranged, who from his comic book store in Pontevedra promotes this series on and on. of Japanese comics in the most original way that a server has ever seen: in each video on his Instagram account, he collects a copy of the manga and bang! He smashes it against a table, sometimes even inviting third parties to participate… Well, I think it’s great, but be careful not to do the same with any of the books in which I appear in anthology because, if you dare, I’m planning to show up in your bookstore and our fight in the purest manga style will be worthy of a novel.
Your brain is hungryby Dr. Marián García (Planet). And I don’t know how to cook, but what I do know is how to eat, so I decided to start September with a diet to lose a few pounds so that the literary world would stop calling me “that naughty, chubby citizen critic.” To do this, and continuing my end-of-summer initiative to read books of genres that I’m not used to, I came across this popular science book written so that the reader can discover the mechanisms that our brain has to make us gain weight (the author talks about that “emotional hunger” that leads us straight to obesity). Did it work for me? Well, how cool, because what my brain really hungers for are new literary works, high-quality narrative proposals, new literature that…Come on, German, don’t worry, the new school year is coming… to be able to revise.
