<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - reading]]> 10 <![CDATA[The straightener]]> Due to an inconveniently hedonistic conception of reading, what are known as ‘compulsory readings’ in schools and high schools began to have a bad reputation. Paraphrasing Borges, it was said that ‘compulsory reading’ was an oxymoron, because all reading implies pleasure, and there is nothing compulsory that truly gives enjoyment. But in educational centers everything is compulsory: the multiplication tables are, or the periodic table of elements, or grammar, even the schedules. Learning implies yielding and placing oneself at the service of certain knowledge, or of wisdom that must be imposed as truths are always imposed; these are supposed to obey no one, but rather it is we who must pursue them. The end of compulsory readings meant nothing more than that they were no longer compulsory by law and common throughout the country, but rather that the choice of works was left to the centers. In my time, the classics of Catalan and Spanish literature were combined with more current and accessible books, often even commercial ones, ultimately of more than questionable quality, which made the important or canonical works that, often against the grain, we had to swallow, shine by contrast.

]]> <![CDATA[Why reading comprehension is collapsing: “Children arrive who only know 20 words”]]>

There are children who know how to read, but do not know how to explain what they have read. They can pronounce the words of a text and reach the end of the page, but when the teacher asks them what that which they have just read means, the answer does not come. It is a scene that teachers consulted by ARA Balears claim to find more and more often in classrooms and which helps to understand a piece of data that is hard to forget: the Balearic Islands have lost 31 points in reading comprehension in the PISA tests, from the 472 of the previous edition to the current 441. The decline does not speak only of books. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand a text, relate its information, make inferences and draw conclusions from it. And, according to the teachers and professors consulted, the difficulties begin long before a student has a PISA text in front of them. They begin when they do not yet know how to read.

]]> <![CDATA[Three narrators for a new time]]> Persecuted, underestimated, and, even today, marginalized: Mallorcan narrative has not always had its continuity guaranteed. Because although we have counted on a continuum of authors who have cultivated our poetry, narrative has experienced more worrying intermittencies. After the disruption of the Civil War, the already precarious narrative of the early 20th century found a notable recovery in the postwar authors, and lived its definitive explosion with the Generation of the Seventies. Authors such as Antònia Vicens, Guillem Frontera, Maria Antònia Oliver, Biel Mesquida, and Gabriel Janer Manila made it clear what was not entirely evident at the time: that Mallorca was a land of poets… And also of narrators. Now, the irruption of three young voices reinforces this path, maintained by dozens of authors now consolidated such as Sebastià Alzamora, Neus Canyelles, Melcior Comes, and Sebastià Perelló.

]]> <![CDATA[Read to live well]]> I don't know if I am more saddened by the results of the latest PISA report or by the fact that we have definitively left behind the famous name with which it was once christened by Joana Maria Camps, Minister of Education in the time of José Ramón Bauzá. Be that as it may, and jokes aside, it seems that our children and young people are well and truly 'trampled', if we compare our local results with the European average in areas such as reading, mathematics, and science.As a writer and translator, but above all as a person who could never conceive of themselves if it were not through the conversation with others and the world that is reading, I am particularly concerned that the report points out that the new generations have no problem reading short paragraphs, but that they find significant difficulties when they have to understand and process complex or longer texts. That is to say, they 'can' read, but they do not 'know' how to read properly, plain and simple.Given this, I think it is important not to forget that reading can be great entertainment, but also many other things. Reading is an essential competence to live in the world in which we live: actions as basic as understanding well and signing a contract, following political current events and the main social debates, or defending one's own rights with complex and at the same time forceful arguments are difficult to imagine without having a minimum background in reading and writing. Because reading is as much like understanding as writing is like thinking, like formulating, and when we know how to do both things well, we have more tools to inhabit the world in a dignified and more conscious way.And to do so, moreover, throughout life. Often, when we speak of literacy, we think mainly of those years in which people can read for themselves and can share it with others, but numerous studies point out that reading (or having things read aloud to us, that is, being spoken to) is also essential in the so-called golden thousand days. These are those first three years in which a baby's brain has the most plasticity, in which it develops the most, in which the stories we are told, the lap songs we hear, the vocabulary that surrounds us, like a most flavorful broth, begin to make us who we are. From there to autonomous reading, of course, and from that to socialization and reading clubs for young people and adults. Passing, also, through the importance of the accompanying role that reading can have in the final stages of life, whether to combat unwanted loneliness (a chronic disease of the present) or to accompany a grieving process.Making citizens into readers means fostering their freedom in the future as well. That they will have more tools for critical thinking at their disposal, that they will better process complexity, and that, in an increasingly convulsive context, they will know how to find or seek peace, to pause, to reflect.We would be wrong if, as a society, we did not make it a priority: to live well, one must return to books.

]]> <![CDATA["Men read philosophy or metaphysics books to feel interesting."]]>

Júlia Mérida (Inca, 1995) holds a degree in Musicology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and teaches at the Felanitx high school. A passionate reader and successful podcaster, she is now launching a book club in Manacor, this Thursday at the Món de Llibres bookstore. Gratitude, by Delphine de Vigan (Ediciones 62, 2021), as a touchstone for a prosperous path of community literature. We talked for a while.

]]> <![CDATA[Closing a book...out of emotion]]>

Sometimes I'm incredibly lucky to be moved to unimaginable levels by the creations of others. It's a very powerful experience for me. The first time I heard the Sarabande As Handel played, a kind of physical pleasure rose from my legs to the pit of my stomach. My knees buckled, and I had to breathe deeply because I thought I was going to faint. I remember it perfectly. I must have been about 15 years old, and I was watching... Barry Lyndonby Stanley Kubrick. The film mesmerized me, and that music touched every fiber of my heart.

]]> <![CDATA[Cognitive inequality]]> Several years after the pandemic, which accelerated the digitalization of society, children are arriving at our schools unable to even maintain eye contact, neither with each other nor with an adult. This is especially true for low-income families, because although screen use affects us all regardless of our circumstances, these families face the greatest difficulties in accessing educational and parenting resources for their children that don't involve the 'easy' solution of staying home and plugging into an increasingly complex screen—be it television, mobile phone, or other devices, thanks to the influence of the internet and social media. These children, like many teenagers, have socialized more with screens than with their peers, which would give them a certain 'mastery' of digital tools were it not for their lack of maturity for responsible use.

]]> <![CDATA[Ecce Woman]]> Far from the train Antonia Vicens's novel strikes with unusual force, confirming, page after page, the indomitable talent of an already essential author. La Magrana's publication twenty-five years after the first edition is not only an act of justice, but above all an invitation to (re)discover a work that remains radically relevant. Cecilia's story, immersed in an emotional and physical vertigo marked by AIDS, unfolds with a disarming and visceral intensity: Vicens sugarcoats nothing, offers no protection to the reader, and it is precisely thanks to this naked and stark gaze that a most painful tragedy unfolds, leaving her a monstrous, unspeakable figure. The suffering, the fear, the delirium, the fragility, and the conversations and interactions with angels are not described, they are narrated and experienced in the first person through an incisive, wounding prose that transforms the reading into a raw, profound, and unforgettable experience, a relentless read that—I know this for a fact—is truly remarkable.

]]> <![CDATA[Mystical Readings (II): The Primordial Animal Spirit]]> We cross, on the back of words, our sea-cemetery and an ocean with plastic banks, to the American continent, where the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio says mass. On one of her usual walks of observation through the countryside, a god in the form of a deer announces to her that her only destiny is to write poems. In the essay Mystics (WunderKammer, 2025), Begoña Méndez writes that "God, like music, is something that is not understood and only felt." Non-human nature has always spoken to us; when we listened to it, we interpreted it as a divinity, or a previous existence of the soul. Méndez recounts the stories of poets and thinkers who accepted this call, and describes feminine mysticism as "a heretical and dissident practice that restored the sacred dimension to the flesh." The body, the object that contains us, whose physical element we struggle to separate ourselves from when transcending space-time, takes on the function of a medium between life on Earth and the afterlife.

]]> <![CDATA[Ten children's books for Christmas]]>

When winter arrives and the Tió de Nadal (a traditional Catalan Christmas log) starts to get fatter, books become one of the most special gifts: they last, they're reread, they're shared, and they create memories. We've selected ten suggestions for all ages and tastes: classics that stir emotions, picture books to look at again and again, books with cats, adventures to get lost in, and stories that spark conversations. This Christmas, make sure there are plenty of stories to read together.

]]> <![CDATA[12 children's and young adult books to get hooked on reading]]>

It is always a good time to foster the reading habit. We recommend several titles for all ages and tastes so that your children get hooked on reading. This is a selection made by Marta Gil, bookseller at El Gat Pelut in Barcelona, ​​specializing in children's and young adult literature.

]]> <![CDATA[Juliana Canet and Marina Porras, the miracle of making high school readings sexy]]>

This Thursday, July 10th, a good handful of young people were queuing at six in the evening at the Drac Màgic bookstore in Palma. It wasn't to buy the latest new release or to meet a trendy author. It was to listen to a conversation about a classic of Mallorcan literature in Catalan. Béarn or the doll room, by Lorenzo Villalonga. Many, surely, wouldn't have believed it if they'd been told in high school that it would be there, and not at the beach, on a summer day. But that's the effect. Tandem Club. Juliana Canet (Cardedeu, 1999) and Marina Porras (Rubí, 1991) are the hosts of this multi-format 3Cat program about literature that has sought to break the barrier between television and podcasts to also create a reading club from different bookstores throughout Catalonia. After broadcasting the eighth and final episode, focusing on the figure of Villalonga, Canet and Porras closed this first season in Palma, where they announced that they will return to talk about Blai Bonet in the second season of the program, which they are already preparing.

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