Spanish books in Toronto!

For years I’d been searching for a copy of Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York, a play I performed back in Mexico. I couldn’t find it anywhere: big bookstores, small bookstores, online, in Canada, in the United States –nowhere. Until a friend of mine told me about Theatre Books, a little store specializing in screenplays [...]

Books by the foot?

This is bizarre and plain wrong. I don’t know what is worse: the service itself or the careful selection of maxims about books that make no mention of actually reading them.

Economic measurement

I just finished reading Fritz Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, and it reminded me of a speech by Robert F. Kennedy that I wanted to share:
Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight [...]

2007 recommendations: Books

Here’s a short list of some of the great books I discovered this year. Fiction:

The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin: Both are honest, bold, exciting, and soothing. And they’re science fiction too.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: High adventure around the comic books industry (?!). [...]

Artful Making

Some years ago, while I was an undergrad and for a couple of years after graduation, I participated heavily in two theatre groups, mainly as an actor, but also as a translator, backstage staff, and assistant director.
I loved it all along, absolutely, in great part because of the peculiar kind of teamwork that we had [...]

Buildings shift like clouds

“What is suggested here is a new dimension—architects maturing from being just artists of space to artists of time.”
–Stewart Brand, “How Buildings Learn”
We think of buildings as some of our most immutable creations. Throughout their lifespan, their basic shape, their room distribution, and their purpose, remains mostly constant over time. They may last for centuries [...]

Who *really* killed Roger Ackroyd?

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one of the first mystery novels I read, almost 20 years ago, and it’s ending got me hooked on the adventures of the detective Hercule Poirot until I had exhausted them. I know it has the same effect on other people –it seems to be one of [...]

Zombies among us

Somewhere there’s got to be a Ph.D. dissertation on how each society imagines monsters that suit their time and place. Ancient Anglo-Saxons had ugly monsters that broke into their fortresses at night, the church-dominated Dark Ages had its share of witches and demons, the Industrial Revolution had Frankenstein embodying the dangers of technology, to be [...]

Controlling what you can’t measure

I recently came across Tom DeMarco’s “Controlling Software Projects” for a second time, and I remembered my problem with it immediately: The very first line in the book states that “You can’t control what you can’t measure”, and the rest of the text builds upon that phrase to argue that we need metrics to rein [...]

The Dispossessed

After a recommendation from Greg Wilson, I borrowed a copy of Ursula le Guin’s “The Dispossessed“, a 1974 sci-fi novel about a scientist and activist bridging the culture gap between a plausible anarchic society (a sort of non-authoritarian communism) and a capitalistic society much like ours today. It’s a great, intelligent book, full of unexpected [...]