Video: Bestseller not to read: Who is the Giorgio Faletti of gastronomy?
2024 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 12:26
There was talk of books on the Corriere website and cascading on blogs and social networks. Duration: the space of a weekend, but for maniacs like me it was intoxicating. Friday the provocation of the writer Pietro Citati: "I think it is much better not to read at all, rather than reading Dan Brown, Giorgio Faletti and Paulo Coelho". Followed by a thrust on today's literary scene: "A kind of orgy, where what matters is the vulgarity of the imagination, the banality of the plot and the mediocrity of the style".
In the evening, an appendix to The Barbarian Invasions on La7 with a reply from Faletti, which brought up Dumas and Mark Twain no less, like him "destroyed by the critics of the time". The discussion is not new, for years we have been hearing the refrain on the commodification of the Italian publishing industry, the needs of the market that prevail over the value of the books, and the various Fabio Volo who jump to the top of the rankings.
Taking a look at the kitchen section of any bookstore or sales ranking, one inevitably wonders if the same comments are not valid for cooking books. Many of the best sellers belong to authors born on the small screen or who became famous thanks to the television presence (who knows if Faletti's ears ring). Unmissable biographies of the VIP on duty who tells how fame did not take away the time to cook, obviously following the recipes of his mother, who never like her. The colored covers of cake design books, cupcakes, jokes and various jokes stand out; last but not least, the books that teach how to prepare dinners for 20 people in 40 minutes, and those that promise miraculous weight loss in the same 40 minutes.
Is it just a useless and nostalgic refrain to regret "The talisman of happiness" or "The Italian regional recipes" by Anna Gosetti della Salda, and the timing of the books by Luigi Veronelli not Antonella Clerici, Paolo Monelli not Alessandra Spisni? Are there recent books that are worth the place in your bookstores, or has the food market become definitively vulgarized and trivialized?
Citati argues that "readers inherit the qualities of writers". Can we blame all the editorial giants, or is the bar of our taste that has been lowered, and in reality the various "Mattia said and done" and "Cupcakes for princesses" are what we really want?
(I hope you appreciated the choice not to mention, not once, the-who-must-not-be-named, despite her provocative smile popping up from every sales chart I have consulted)
Recommended:
La Bufalotta is not Bel Air (not even Prati). And What do you know is not The Archangel
Gianni Mura wrote - writes - beautiful pages of sports journalism. And he wrote - writes - tasty pages of gastronomic journalism. It happens that he writes - with an abundance of superlatives - about Fabrizio Colaiacomo, and about a Roman restaurant recently opened at La Bufalotta called “Che te ne sà”. It also happens that […]
Dissapore à la carte, what you want to read and what not
Do you remember the first post of Dissapore? It was March 15, 2009, 2 years and seven months have already passed. NO! Do not get upset, we are not on the boulevard of memories nor will I list here merits, faults, numbers, people, scoops and bla bla. Except that after some time it is a good habit to summarize the essential points […]
Which of the 10 most read and commented posts of 2013 do you not know?
The list of end-of-year lists cannot be said to be complete without the best posts of 2013. Or rather, those that the gods of the internet, indifferent to anything that does not fall within the law of large numbers, told us to be the best. They liked: the recipes, the quarrels between omnivores and vegans, the […]
Food: which books to read in August and which not
What does the unrepentant gastrofighetto do in August? He kills donuts under an umbrella, grills as if there was no tomorrow and, at times, he relaxes. In the brief moments in which he reads a book for pleasure, can he perhaps refrain from choosing publications that, to some extent, have to do with food and wine? Obviously not. In […]
Tea should not be brewed in the microwave: the research we will pretend not to have read
We will pretend not to have read that some Chinese scientists have "discovered" that tea prepared in the microwave is a bad idea, at least for our palate