Sometimes books wait for their place. For example, after a move. The physicist Estel Cardellach made renovations to the house adjacent to the one she had lived in since 1998, in Terrassa, to bring them together. They were permanently installed last year. Now the dilemma is between keeping the decoration as it is, with few objects, or recovering some books from the boxes and provisional shelves in disarray: “Not all of them will return.”
Doctor of Science, researcher at the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya and the Institute of Space Sciences of the CSIC, Cardellach has made more than twenty transfers and is not a fetishist. She lived in the United States in the early 2000s, then in the Exeter area of England, and between 2016 and 2020, in Oxford. She doesn't take the books with her, but she keeps them all. She even the ones she read as a child. She remembers her complicity with her grandmother and her mother while they told her about Margarida, by Lola Anglada: “It makes me nostalgic for a time that I have not lived.”
At twenty years old, Justine and The Alexandria Quartet would impact him. Then she would read the American classics, Faulkner, Steinbeck. He devoted six months to Joyce's Ulysses until he finished it; He was renewing loans at the Los Angeles library. He didn't understand many things, but he liked the descriptions, the phrases, how it was written. Nowadays, if a book doesn't hook him, he puts it down. But first he gives it a second chance, as he will do with The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson.
Its work consists of improving Earth observation from space to better understand climate phenomena and minimize major catastrophes. He says that scientists do not turn their backs on culture. Literature allows them to open their minds and look at things from another angle, it stimulates creativity: “Before the Internet, books were a source of erudition.” He believes that it is a mistake to separate sciences and humanities, when historically they went together and are part of thought. “From specialization and detail, you cannot solve everything, because you need a global vision, a different question that opens up other lines of research.”
You read the articles and documents in digital format. Books for pleasure, always on paper. You may accidentally reread things you didn't remember reading. For example, The Moon and the Bonfires, by Pavese. Or was it The Companion? Be that as it may, he liked her both times. And how is he able to forget some titles and plots? Reading entertains him, relaxes him, “and helps connect ideas, something very important in my work.” It also offers you the projection of having several lives in parallel. The fat of the land, by John Seymour, gave him the bug to return to the land. He didn't do like him and went to the countryside to be self-sufficient, but they have a small garden.
He travels a lot and buys books at airports. The latest: Solito, by Javier Zamora, and The pychopath test, by Jon Ronson. He also likes to go to bookstores, he is guided by the covers and reviews. Before, he read a lot of poetry, not in vain his eldest son is called Màrius after Màrius Torres. Currently he reads more narrative and especially non-fiction, influenced by the environment: “Interests are shaped; The people you go with, the recommendations, the conversations, lead you to one reading or another.” From Small is beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher, a Combats et metamorphoses d'une femme, by Édouard Louis. He reads in Spanish, Catalan, English, French, and is starting with Italian because his partner's family is from there, but he has a hard time. With Carlo they traveled to Ithaca by sailboat, and he introduced his children to Greek mythology.
Cardellach reads by night because he has no material time by day. They gave him a small individual led lamp so as not to disturb his leg. The books are piling up on the table: Boulder, by Eva Baltasar; Consumed by fire, by Jaume Cabré; Our mothers, by Gemma Ruiz; Conversations at the vineyard, by Maria Rosa Ferré Galimany; The Mysteries of the Kamogawa Kitchen, by Isashi Kashiwai. They raise different questions while waiting for their place.
