This coming year I plan to continue my annual reading challenge, a practice I took up at the start of my retirement in 2020. What started as a reading pastime, a casual return to my original life-love with the refound ‘lost times’, has turned into a life focus as we become more aware with each...Read More

WOW! This is such an amazing flight-of-the-spirit book dressed up as a very imaginative and fun sci-fy tour de force. As all good science fiction should be. The book consists of a set of 30 vignettes encased by a prologue and an epilogue and divided in equal parts by three ‘intermissions. The prologue and the...Read More

Professor Emily Levesque’s book is not an academic astronomy treatise. It is not an academic class textbook. It is on the other hand a very engaging and fun read about the ‘observational’ astronomer’s day-to-day life. It almost sounds like an interesting friend’s narration about the behind the scene challenges, discoveries and, often, even tedious waits...Read More

In ‘Montmartre’, Roe argues with a hefty support of exceptional scholarship, that Modernist Art was a product of the first decade of twentieth century Montmartre, not born in the 1920s to (in her words) ‘the accompaniment of Charleston, black jazz and mint juleps’. It was the product of the cross pollination between artists, writers, dancers,...Read More

For the longest time this little tome had patiently looked down from my bookshelves to my comings and goings waiting to be picked up. Long time. I was supposed to have read it in graduate school, but I never got around to it before I quit. And for all that long I was under the...Read More

Read it if… If you are intrigued and inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Japanese art, with its attention to the melancholic representation of the trace of the passage of time. In this book, Andrew Juniper invites us to explore with his simple and easily accessible exposition the spiritual principles of the Wabi Sabi concept,...Read More

Read it if… after going through a year of the pandemic (and finding ourselves again facing an abyss…) I would like to put our historical moment in perspective, understand the implications and expectations and remember that humanity has been here before and survived (transformed…) to tell the tale. ”Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death...Read More

(February 27, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez) Well, maybe not so fast. Having just completed my one year exploration of international breads, I made a purpose of moving on and apply the same disciplined curiosity to new explorations and new discoveries in what was opening up as a new branch of my life line. Baking was...Read More

(January 31, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez) As I come to the end of an amazing year of revelations, discoveries, agonizing indecisions and huge acts of faith and acceptance, I sense a world of new horizons opening ahead of me. For one, I am wrapping a yearlong exploration of breads, bread baking and techniques, my previous...Read More

(December 20, 2018/ Illustration: segment of illustration for book cover by Juan Ibanez) This morning Alta delivered the box of my poem book, Mearcstapa. This has been a project postponed for decades (funny that as you age you can say this about more and more ‘things’) and the most recent step in my Kick the...Read More