Mayor of Zaragoza Advocates for Children to Receive Books as Gifts

“May all children receive a gift, even if it is a book,” said the mayor of Zaragoza, Natalia Chueca, in a famous slip, receiving the Three Wise Men. Poor children who only have books, and may have plastic and colored toys. Actually, what the mayor said is not so crazy: reading is what we do when there is nothing better to do, that’s why people read in the dentist’s waiting room, in the subway car, in line at the supermarket. , as a remedy against everyday tedium. Now that there are phones that are smarter than their owners, there is always something better to do, which is why where you used to see people reading, you usually see people absorbed in the smartphone screen, scrolling like someone praying the rosary. There is starting to be Wi-Fi on airplanes, the last temples of reading.

Reading, however, is highly recommended for children, any pedagogue or pediatrician will tell you. My two-something-year-old daughter Candela’s relationship with books is close. In general, the relationship between children and books seems closer to us than that of adults. As we grow up, we leave that primary activity of reading to engage in other more interesting and mature activities, such as social networks, football or alcohol. Candela really likes it when we read to her or, rather, show her her stories; those artifacts with rigid pages that, when she acquired some language, she called “pentos”, and that, still far away from screens and other distractions, are her main source of entertainment and learning.

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In one of them, a well-known yellow bear soaks himself in honey until his stomach hurts. So his group of closest friends (a pig, a tiger, an owl) searches his house for honey, finds the stash stored under his bed and hides it, because, as they observe, the bear is not his own master. The story speaks openly about addiction: it strikes me that the bear’s friends are forced to make such a radical decision, breaking into his home without permission and stealing the honey. Even if it’s for your own good. In another story, a group of animals collaborate by forming a tower with their bodies, from the largest, the elephant, to the smallest, the mouse, to reach the Moon and take a bite. We like the message, which promotes collaboration between all the animals in the forest regardless of differences and, what’s more, taking advantage of them. Although poor Luna, in the end, is left sad and crippled by the mouse’s bite, which has left her small teeth marked on the edge.

Other of Candela’s favorite books make up the collection From the cradle to the moon, from the Kalandraka publishing house, the work of the poet Antonio Rubio and the cartoonist Oscar Villán. They are very pretty, in a square format, and very simple; They can be read singing. One, titled Violin, It’s about musical instruments and ends with a kiss to dad; another, titled Animals, stars snails, crocodiles and elephants; other, Luna, The great success of the collection is about the melancholic satellite of the Earth, since the Moon and animals seem to star in a good part of the editorial production for children. It’s a shame that most adults are not aware of the wonders of children’s and young people’s literature until we are parents, when we discover that it is a fantastic and diverse territory, and, apparently, a good business.

Candela asks over and over again that we tell her the “pentos”, she never gets tired, even if we have told them to her 40 times and she knows them by heart (one night when she couldn’t sleep I told her one exactly 40 times, to her delight). In fact, it seems that what she likes is knowing them by heart, knowing the melodies and being able to predict what is going to happen: the distaste for spoilers is also something very adult and very contemporary; Traditionally, the joy of narratives was knowing how they unfolded and ended, not living in the cruel uncertainty of the cliffhanger. Such is Candela’s passion for that collection that we took her, shortly before her second birthday, to the Madrid Book Fair, in Retiro Park, which I was covering that summer, so that at the Kalandraka booth she could see to Antonio Rubio and he will sing one of his books and sign another. Candela didn’t know very well who Antonio Rubio was, or what he was doing in that booth, locked inside that zoo of trained writers that is the Fair, but we found him friendly and funny, and we kept the anecdote forever: the girl’s beginnings in book signings. We have a photo.

Books are not just read or looked at. For Candela, a book is a meccano: she doesn’t care about the thesis she defends or the most poetic facets of the style, but rather the colors of its cover, its size, stacking them in one way or another, like a small and delirious architect. She has a special preference for the volumes of the Argentine publisher Caja Negra that, although they are dedicated to the most disruptive facets of contemporary thought (accelerationism, neooperaism, xenofeminism), they exert a special spell on the girl, with bright colors and geometric designs. With the most avant-garde philosophy, Candela makes towers and mountains, as if nothing were happening. We spend the day rearranging the lowest shelves of the library, where the girl reaches and does her thing, and sometimes we find the mess it creates irritating, but we do not prevent her from accessing it, because we think that rubbing with books since she was little might make her a great reader in the future. Who knows.

Candela learns many things in books, and the most surprising thing is the ease with which she extrapolates the ideal, two-dimensional world of Teo’s story drawings to three-dimensional reality, which has more corners and roughness and fewer pastel colors. It is the passage from the Platonic world of ideas to the unpleasant material world: Candela is working in his head, without knowing it, the foundations of Western thought. What would Candela do without books. Even if they are just books.

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2024-01-17 04:30:40
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