reading log


# 2025


## 2025-12 Yo, Julia, por Santiago Posteguillo
Bastante entretenido, y con algunas escenas memorables y de tremenda violencia. El estilo de este escritor me ha parecido bastante seco y anodino, pero al final los hechos históricos son los protagonistas. Me ha gustado mucho el ensayo del final, reivindicando la figura de Julia. En la novela, Julia es un claro ejemplo de personaje "Mary Sue". Habría sido interesante que el libro profundizara más en la historia de Galeano, el médico.


## 2025-11 Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman

This is a great book, full of originality and spirit. I don't know how it escaped my radar until now, but I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, called "His Dark Materials".


## 2025-10 The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This is a beautiful book that makes you love nature and the rhythm of the seasons.


## 2025-10 The Bonehouses, by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Quite an entertaining book, but without much substance.


## 2025-10 Matilda, by Roald Dhal

I will never forget the role of Miss Honey, the teacher. What a delightful character from a delightful book. An interesting topic here is clever and anonymous revenge, which can be read as very radical politics.


## 2025-09 Animal Farm, by George Orwell

Revolutionary in both senses: it is about animal oppression and about the absurdity of communist attempts. In the end, the human criticism is the main topic and the animal issues are left aside. A very stimulating read.



# 2024


## The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim N. Taleb

Not the best of the five volumes of the Incerto but definitely worth rereading, especially the first half.


## The Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky

After hearing so many good things about this book I gave it a try, and couldn't be more disappointed. This book is poorly written, poorly edited and lacks care and passion for the subject. Had this been my first interaction with physics, I wouldn't have studied it. It is a very, very poor shadow of The Feynman Lectures. Sure, it is shorter, but much shallower than shorter. Don't fool yourself and go for the real thing (Feynman and then Landau). Or, for a recent and great introduction, Classical Mechanics with Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control by Mark Levi. 


## Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom, by Ted Chiang

Amazing short story about parallel universes. It explores really interesting consequences of being able to talk with your parallel self. For example, being able to collaborate with your paraselves as a team, or know yourself statistically from a sample. A really good read. 


## The Black Swan, by Nassim N. Taleb

I have greatly enjoyed rereading this masterpiece of thought. One of the best books I have ever read. 


## Symmetry, by Hermann Weyl

A fascinating topic, but an awful book. Weyl may have been a great mathematician and physicist, but here it shows his awful writing abilities. The topic of symmetry is really interesting, as revealed in the marvelous 'The symmetries of things', by Conway, Burgiel and Goodman-Strauss (one of my favourite books by far). A good thing of this book, though, is the collection of examples from art and architecture.


## Todo es comparable, de Oscar Tusquets Blanca

De nuevo un texto magnífico de Tusquets. Me encanta su tesis principal. ¿Qué es eso de que no se pueden comparar peras con limones? ¡Pero si ambas son frutas, ambas crecen en un árbol, y hay muchas más cosas en común! El libro tiene momentos magníficos. En particular, es el libro que contiene el germen de su Requiem por la Escalera, aquí en forma de responso. Su crítica a algunos deportes es brillante.


## Pasando a limpio, de Oscar Tusquets Blanca

Pretendiendo ser superficial, acaba siendo profundo. Un delicioso libro con el que aprendes, piensas, te indignas y te ríes. No se puede pedir mucho más. Me he enganchado a este autor, y ya he sacado de la biblioteca su "Todo es comparable". Con su Requiem por la escalera me abrió los ojos a las que son mi elemento arquitectónico favorito. En este libro consigue algo parecido con las ventanas. Como bonus, me enseña la palabra "bailarina" para un compás que, según encuentro en un buscador, sirve para trazar circunferencias muy pequeñas. 


## Contra la desnudez, de Oscar Tusquets Blanca

Oscar Tusquets siempre te hace pensar y sonreír, y además le encanta provocar.
En este libro vuelve a conseguir las tres cosas.


# 2023


## Fooled by randomness, by N.N. Taleb

[reread]

A book written for fun.

Borrowed wisdom: when you talk or write about things not naturally springing from your memory.

Our brain sees the world less random than it is.

There is the world where we live, and the world we are convinced we live in: two different planets.

The author becomes transformed by his own book.

ex ante (expectations) --- present --- ex post (narrative)  [hindsight bias]

more random than we think ≠ all is random

Mistaking irreverence for arrogance => confuse skepticism for nihilism.

round-trip fallacy: using statistics without logic is a mistake, but using logic without statistics is not. The fallacy is that people using logic are asked for data to support the claims, but this data is not actually needed. However, you cannot use statistic without logic (as is frequently the case).

Solon's warning: you cannot claim victory or success until the end, because fortune can change.

Alternative histories thinking: you can't judge a performance by its results, but by the costs of the alternatives. Consider the same outcome, one which is only achieved by a single history and another that is consistent through different historie. They are qualitatively different.

There is no need to compute alternative histories, only to assess their attributes. Probability is a qualitative subject, a way of thinking.

Russian roulette: Reality as a revolver that has thousands of bullet chambers, instead of six. Observe the barrel of reality, of which we generally know nothing.

Denigration of history: feeling that things happening (or happened) to others would not necessary happen to me.

Losing sight of the risks by never considering the losers.

Ingratitude factor: if your advises work and fatal things never happen, people will just complain about you spending. And of course, if fatal things happen, you are blamed for that. Bad either way!

Politics and doctors dilemma: warn against risk but not condeming it. Tension between false positive and false negative. With the former, you tell a patient he has cancer but he has not. With the latter, you tell him he is healthy but he is not. Their business need error margins.

People do not like to insure against something abstract. Only vivid risks get the attention.

Our brain is superficial when it comes to risk and probability. Clues are largely determined by emotions or by the ease with which they come to mind.

Risk detection and avoidance are not mediated in the thinking part of the brain, but in the emotional one.

Rational thinking has little to do with risk avoidance. Rational thinking is more about rationalising one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

Your emotional apparatus is the cheapest to deliver sensation, and it can fool you the most.

Confusion between correctness and intelligibility: (danger of thinking that the latter implies the former)

- correctness: the quality of being in agreement with the true facts or with what is generally accepted, corrección, exactitud. He quickly proved the [] of his findings.

- intelligibility:	(of speech and writing) the quality of being possible to understand: Foreign accented speech may affect []. She reviews articles for consistency and [].

Einstein: common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

What sounds intelligent is suspicious.

The generator of reality is not observable.

Epiphenomena: the illusion of cause and effect only because they coexist in time.

Risk manager: more concerned about the impression of risk reduction than actual risk reduction.

Watching your risks do not decrease them. It only gives you illusion of control. Dangerous.

Mathematics is a tool to meditate rather than to compute.

All respect we have for history does not translate well into our treatment of the present.

Things are always obvious after the fact.

The past always looks deterministic.

Our minds will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Predicting the past.

Distilled thinking: thinking based on information around us that is stripped of meaningless but diverting clutter.

Solon's warning as "age is beauty". Contrast this with the prevailing culture.

Value distilled thought over newer thinking.

Progress: Some new information is better than past information. But when in doubt, reject the new.

The opportunity cost of missing a new thing is minuscule compared to the toxicity of all the garbage one has to go through to get to an (alleged) jewel.

Efficient market: prices should adapt to all available information in such a way as to be totally unpredictable to us humans and prevent people from deriving profits.

Survival of the fittest: under regime switching, unclear who will be the fittest. And fittest is different from appearing to be the fittest.

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.

For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen. (Cavafy)

In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all. (Cavafy)

Scaling property of randomness: if you observe with dt, you only see noise. If you observe big Dt, you can see signal.

Watching with small dt is bad for your health. You will eat all the noise. And, even if on average you don't lose or win, the pleasure of winning is small compared to the pain of losing. So emotionally you lose even if mathematically you have net 0.

Is this a reason against Carpe diem or Mindfulness? 

We don't need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the detail of our daily life - only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival.

If I am going to be fooled by randomness, it better be of the beautiful and harmless kind. Art, music, literature...

No precise plan ahead of time as to what to do in the event of losses.

Denial when losses occur.

How frequent is the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts. However, commentators have their success linked to how often they are right or wrong.

This could apply to science: what is important is the value you provide, not the amount of papers you publish (me).

Pushing randomness under the rug: Investors will be drawn into strategies that experience rare but large variations, for emotional reasons.

People tend to be sensitive to the presence or absence of a stimulus rather than its magnitude.

Life is not a simple win/lose situation, as the cost of the losses can be very different from that of the wins.

Don't approach anything as a game to win.

Stay away from people of competitive nature, who try to reduce the world to categories: number of published papers, etc.

You can accumulate wins and yet sitting on a time bomb.

Taleb is a crisis hunter.

The more information you have, the more you are confident about the outcome.

Classical statistics: the confidence level increases as sqrt(n) as n (sample size) increases. Urn with black and red balls. I want to know the relative proportion of each colour. After 20 drawings, my confidence level is sqrt(2) times greater than after 10 drawings.

Real statistics: distributions are not symmetric. If there are way more black balls than red, our knowledge about the absence of red will increase very slowly, slower than sqrt(n). But our knowledge of the presence of black will increase faster than sqrt(n).

The asymmetry in knowledge is not trivial.

The problem of stationarity: in some cases, the proportion of red balls is not constant, but changes randomly. Then, our inferences become insignificant.

Distributions not being stationary!

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion (Hume, John Stuart Mill).

Ratchet 1: We can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. Data to reject rather to confirm hypotheses.

Ratchet 2: If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it, why should our future resemble our current past?
 
Read discoveries don't last. Self discoveries last.

Feeling you need to read everything can prevent you from taking contemplative stops.

I needed the backing of my bank account so I could buy time to think and enjoy life.

Popper: the epitome of no nonsense.

Two types of theories:

1) Theories that are known to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected (they are falsified).

2) Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong.

A theory is never right.

A theory cannot be verified.

A theory that falls outside of these two categories is not a theory.

Popper refused to blindly accept that knowledge can always increase with incremental information, which is the foundation of statistical inference. It may in some instances, but we do not know which ones.

The matter of knowledge and discovery is not so much in dealing with what we know as in dealing with what we do not know.

These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures (Popper).

These are scientists.

Popper is the antidote of positivism. Verification is not possible.

Positivism: the belief that knowledge comes from things that can be experienced with the senses or proved by logic (Cambridge)

We like to emit logical and rational ideas, but we don not necessarily enjoy their execution. We are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally.

Memory is a machine to make inductive inferences.

Causality is easier to commit to memory.

Induction, going from plenty of particulars to the general, takes less room in memory. But the effect of such *compression* isthe reduction in the degree of detected randomness.

With enough time, any random process can produce a high quality output. The interest question is whether the same process can produce with the same quality just after the previous one.

The initial sample size matters greatly. If you have 5 monkeys and 1 writes the Iliad vs having 5000000 monkeys instead. The conclusions will greatly differ.

Becoming more rational, or not feeling emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race. There is no solace to be found from reasoning.

Survivorship bias => the highest performing realisation will be the most visible. The losers don't show up.

Beware of your sample. Include those who perished. Consider the cemetery.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The number of persons with great outputs depends far more on the number of initial people than on their ability.

People believe that they can figure out the properties of the distribution from the sample they are witnessing.

Ergodicity: the believe that time will eliminate the annoying effect of randomness.

Nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.

Polya process: Assume an urn with equal number of red and black balls. When you take a black, you put the ball back in the urn and add a given number of black balls. If you drew a red ball, you would return the ball plus some number of extra red balls.

Mathematics may be of only secondary help in our real world.

Monte Carlo simulations: In freeing us from equations it frees us from the traps of inferior mathematics.

Mathematics is merely a way of thinking and meditating, little more, in our world of randomness.

Gaussian distribution: charted randomness. But randomness is usually uncharted.

Mandelbrot: there is a wild type of randomness of which we will never know much (owing to their unstable properties).

Our brain is not cut for nonlinearities.

Better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds.

Mathematical expectation = linear combination of outcomes. But our minds can only visualise the pure states. Eigenvalues? Connection to QM?

We are rational, but in a limited way: boundedly rational.

Prospect theory: Looking at differences, not absolutes, and resetting to a specific reference point.

Sound-bite effect, or affect heuristic: People react to concrete and visible risks, not abstract ones. What emotions are elicited by events determine their probability in your mind.

Belief in the law of small numbers: Inductive fallacies; jumping to general conclusions too quickly.

Two systems of reasoning: the working brain is not quite the reasoning one.

Overconfidence: risk taking out of an underestimation of the odds. People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

Anchoring: giving value in reference to a recent reference instead of considering the whole history.

The availability heuristic: death from terrorism seems more likely than death from any cause, including terrorism!

The Linda problem, or the representativeness heuristic: a feminist student is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than just a bank teller.

The simulation heuristic: counterfactual thinking. Mentally undoing events. 

Two systems of reasoning:

1) effortless, automatic, associative, rapid, parallel, opaque, emotional, concrete, specific, social, personalised.

2) effortful, controlled, deductive, slow, serial, self-aware, neutral, abstract, sets, asocial, depersonalised.

Our brains are made for fitness, not for truth (Steven Pinker).

We do not think when making choices but use heuristics.

We make serious probabilistic mistakes in today's world. 

I consider myself as prone to foolishness as anyone I know, in spite of my profession and the time spent building my expertise on the subject. But here is the exception: I know that I am very, very weak on that score. My humanity will try to foil me; I have to stay on my guard.

I am not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler's reliability (the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table. The book review from an non-qualified person is all about that person. The opinion from a qualified person is all about the book.

The toxicity of the information age...

I have personally failed in achieving a general insulation from randomness, but I have managed a few tricks.

We are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.

It is harder to act as if one were ignorant than as if one were smart.

It is emotionally harder to reject a hypothesis than to accept it.

Path dependence of beliefs

Tendency to get married to positions.

Purely rational behaviour can come from a defect in the amygdala that blocks the emotions of attachment, meaning that the subject is, literally, a psychopath.

Absence of marriage to ideas is rare among humans.

People who switch parties are traitors, apostates.

Computing instead of thinking: an error.

Probability entered mathematics with gambling theory, and stayed as a mere computational device.

People "measure" risks, particularly if they are paid for it.

Start a meeting by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

Attribution bias: You attribute your success to skills, but your failures to randomness. It is an heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

People confuse science and scientists.

Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous.

A scientist may be forced to act like a cheap defence lawyer rather than a pure seeker of the truth. A doctoral thesis is defended.

Science is better than scientists.

Epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results.

We are left only with dignity as a solution. 

Dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behaviour that does not depend on the immediate circumstance.

Just listen while shaking by emotion but not with the coward's imploration and complaints.

While shaking with emotion. No stiff upper lip. There is nothing wrong and undignified with emotions. We are cut to have them. What is wrong is not following the heroic or, at least, the dignified path. That is what stoicism truly means.

Randomness and personal elegance.

Ideas do not truly sink in when emotions come into play; we do not use our rational brain outside classrooms.

Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain. The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behaviour. Good luck.

Lower-ranking persons are judged on both process and results. Top-ranking only on results.

Our attribution of heroism to those who took crazy decisions but were lucky enough to win shows the aberration. We continue to worship those who won and despise those who lost, no matter the reason. I wonder how many historians use luck in their interpretation of success, and how many are conscious of the difference between process and result.

Schedule randomness help to relax.

We are made to live like firemen.

You can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.

We are not designed for schedules.

Books are fun to write, papers are painful.

Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death?

Behave with randomness. Unpredictability is a strong deterrent.

We favour the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.


## La niña de Gómez Arias, de Calderón

Obra escalofriante.


# 2023


## My inventions, by Nikola Tesla

I have not been able to appreciate this book. His talents are way beyond mine and I cannot follow him. I found his style chaotic to say the least. It looks like he was a superman from another galaxy. I am not worthy of his words. He is simply too much. But as a writer, he is utterly inaccessible. 


## El mago de Oz, de L. Frank Baum

Malísimo, y además con gestos de violencia gratuita. Él parece que quería apartarse de los cuentos clásicos para niños, quitando lo malo, pero contiene mucha crueldad gratuita. No me ha gustado nada de nada.


## El paquete parlante, de Gerald Durrell

Muy malo. Los dos chicos sobran. 
Hay quien cree que la literatura infantil es mala literatura. O que la mala es infantil. Nada de eso. Este libro es mala literatura y ya está.


## Todas las escaleras del mundo, de Santiago de Molina

Lectura muy interesante sobre uno de mis temas favoritos: las escaleras. Otra gran recomendación de Montse, que me nutre con su gran conocimiento. 


## Antifragility, by N. N. Taleb

A masterpiece that I need to read again soon.


## The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

I laughed 42 times.


## Death's End, by Liu Cixin

3rd part of Remembrance of Earth's Past. Reading this trilogy has been an incredible experience. The scope is mind blowing. Probably as good as the best SF ever written.


## The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin

2nd part of Remembrance of Earth's Past. Astonishing voyage for the mind. 


## Réquiem por la escalera, por Oscar Tusquets

Buenísimo libro recomendado por Montse Bosch. Las escaleras siempre han sido mi obsesión, sobre todo para subirlas corriendo. Este libro les da el protagonismo que siempre han merecido.


## Dios lo ve, por Oscar Tusquets

Este concepto, nuevo para mí, parece que es un mantra de la arquitectura. Un tesoro.


# 2021


## Meditations on Self-Discipline an Failure, by William Ferraiolo

What a reading! And what a beginning this book has! Really powerful and wise. Throughout the book, the author slaps you in the face, again and again. It is a very hard, yet hardening experience. 

Ferraiolo focuses on the "what", and not on the "how". Don't expect practical resources to achieve what you want to achieve. If you want something, work on it. Perhaps there is no how. Perhaps the how is a mere bla-bla-bla that will become a (futile) what in itself.

Some parts of the book are quite awkward, like the abortion defence. The author also seems to be quite involved with firearms. I strongly despise this, and I am not happy with the non-inclusive language of the book either. I found this work 90% very good and 10% embarrassing. I decided to read it until the end, learn what I could (which was a lot) and discard the rest.

The essence of stoicism seems to be this: worry about what is actionable, what is on your little sphere of action, and forget about others' spheres. I can agree on this, provided we don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything falls outside our radius of action. For example, take climate change. Of course it is way outside our radius of action to solve this problem, but it is well within our power to change our habits so that we are less harmful. So, don't conclude that you shouldn't worry about climate change because it is out of your radius, because it is not. I think that, well understood, this book is telling you to forget about complaining and start doing what is in your hand. If stoicism is bringing you to stagnation and cynicism, I think you got it wrong. The author does not seem to clarify this important aspect, though. Or perhaps it escaped me. The heart of stoicism begins by deciding what is under your sphere of action, and there is a potential misunderstanding in what this means. There is a lot of things you can do about what is important to you. Just focus on doing them instead of complaining about what others should or should not do.

There is another dark aspect here. Throughout the book, the only sign of "cooperation" between people is a chapter about neighbours, which does not end very well. I find this book too individualist. And I am quite individualist, too. But you cannot throw cooperation to the garbage so easily. Sure, your actions are your own, and you cannot endorse other people's actions, and that is why cooperation is so difficult. I miss more meditations about interacting with other people.

Finally, what about motivation? The author insists on "do what you have to do", "finish your work", and so on, but this is a pancake when you are already driven. What if you are not? And motivation is a social phenomenon. I don't mean you need to be showered with recognition, or pampered with likes. But virtue cannot be self-propelled either. Ferraiolo seems to rely on a perpetual-motion machine here. Without social interaction there cannot be motivation and consequently there cannot be a directed will towards a bold goal. Yet social interactions are not explored here.

I get it: to say "an artist paints a tree because she sees other artists painting trees" does not sound rude and tough, which is the tone of the whole book. But my experience is that without other artists painting trees you would never try to be an artist painting a tree. And the same applies to Stoicism. Perhaps the mirrors in which the author reflects are Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, or Epictetus, but this is still a social interaction at the heart of the problem, and it is not discussed here.

In all, my view is that this book has very prominent virtues and flaws. It can be a good source of wisdom for a critical mind, and it can have dangerous parts for a non-critical thinker. I will definitely come back to many of its meditations, but I could never publicly recommend it. It is a pity, because this book reaches extremely high-quality moments, but the embarrassing parts are not acceptable in a contemporary text.


## Momo, de Michael Ende

Este es un libro que hay que releer tantas veces como sea necesario, es decir, cada vez que se te olvide lo que son las flores horarias, que olvides su música. También reléelo cada vez que olvides la importantísima lección de Casiopea. 

¿Te has dejado robar el tiempo? ¿Todavías juegas? ¿Vives tu vida con una misteriosa prisa que te deja vacío? Quizás sea hora de volver al viejo anfiteatro. 


## Platero y Yo, de Juan Ramón Jiménez

Delicioso libro sobre Moguer, el pueblo de Juan Ramón Jiménez y sobre Platero, un pequeño y suave burro que, según entiendo, existió de verdad.

¿Quién tiene tiempo, paciencia, espacio mental para este nivel de lirismo hoy en día?

Entre cada capítulo, el tiempo pasa, como no puede ser de otra manera. Pero en cada capítulo, el tiempo se detiene. 

Si padeces de impaciencia moderna cada párrafo se te hará sangrante.

Este libro requiere estar en paz con uno mismo. Ríete tú del mindfulness. Esto sí que es verdadero presente, verdadero aquí y ahora.

El autor se muestra amable con cada criatura, pero cuidado, porque al pobre burro lo monta, lo carga y lo pone a trabajar la tierra. Probablemente el burro más feliz de Moguer y alrededores, pero no el más feliz que pudo existir.


## Count Down, by Steve Olson

This is a different book. It begins with a very particular premise: the narration of a mathematical olympiad, held at the United States. But each of the six problems of the exam is almost an excuse to talk about psychology. 

I wanted to read this book to know more about the participants, but instead I got a very interesting summary of psychological reflections concerning intelligence, talent and schooling.

Quite a gem.


## Corvus, a life with birds, by Esther Woolfson

This book is absolutely delicious, in content and form. 

The author opens the door of her house not only to many birds that don't have changes in the wild, but also to you, as a visitor of such a singular place.

As someone who knows what it means to live with a corvid, I can tell first-hand that she faithfully describes these marvellous creatures. She makes you love them even more. And, if you are not the empathic type, it teaches you to at least respect them.

Corvids are among the most clever creatures on Earth, and they deserve all our attention and respect. 

What sanctuary Chicken and her friends found in Esther's home. How lucky they were, given their initial lack of luck, to find her.


## La tierra de Paloma, de Miguel Rojas Mix

Este libro es el primer volumen de una historia de Latinoamérica, supuestamente escrito para leer en la niñez. 

No me ha parecido que la lectura sea suficientemente crítica con el genocidio que llevaron a cabo Colón y compañía, pero es entretenido e informativo.

Tampoco soy de la visión de que los colonizadores que llegaron a partir del 1492 fueran los únicos malos mientras que los nativos fueran los únicos buenos. Tengo muy claro que los nativos de hoy son los colonos del ayer. ¿Cuántas especies no aniquilaros esas poblaciones al llegar a aquellos territorios por primera vez? ¿Qué magnitud de aniquilación ecológica no harían? 

Cuando hablamos de Homo sapiens, hablamos de Homo sapiens, no de nativos y colonos. Todos potencialmente igual de violentos y destructores. Y todos potencialmente capaces de hacer las cosas mucho mejor.


## La maravillosa colina de las edades primitivas, de Ana maría Moix

Un libro que mi madre me leyó varias veces cuando era pequeño, para dormir. 

No es que sea yo especialmente adepto a la mitología, y menos aún a la egipcia, la cual me es completamente desconocida. Pero el libro es delicioso de principio a final, embelesándote en cada capítulo. Sobre todo la historia de Isis buscando a su amado Osiris.

La mitología es muy poderosa porque narra historias que tienen sentido, y las personas tenemos tendencia a creer la primera narrativa con sentido que escuchamos. Todavía hoy construimos mitología alrededor incluso de figuras y acontecimientos científicos.

Una pequeña joya.


## Tony y la puerta maravillosa, de Howard Fast

Me ha gustado mucho esta pequeña historia de un niño que desafía la fe que los adultos pueden tener en él. 

El autor, sorprendentemente, no te deja entrar por la puerta a ti tampoco, lo cual me parece un aspecto genial, por no caer en lo fácil.

También me ha encantado descubrir al Nueva York indio que respira en cada capítulo de esta pequeña delicia.


## Paulina, de Ana María Matute

Una deliciosa historia para leer tanto en la infancia como en la adulfancia en la que vivo.

No hay acción trepidante aquí, sino mucha emotividad medio escondida que está narrada con auténtica solidez. 

Paulina es una especie de Heidi más interna tanto psicológicamente como físicamente, ya que es más reservada y también más casera.

Su "Pedro" también es muy especial. 


## Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman

Huxley vs Orwell.

But maybe

+-------------+
|   Huxley    |
|  +--------+ |
|  | Orwell | |
|  +--------+ |
+-------------+

The problem is not junk TV, but TV pretending not to be junk: news, politics, education...

Education: from "how can I use TV or computer to control education" to "how can I use education to control TV or computer".


## The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

This book is a must for those who want a serious and extensive analysis on the concept of God. This is the third book I read from this author. I thought he could not repeat the immense level of The Selfish Gene or The Extended Phenotype, but here he is, doing it again. A masterpiece of thought and provocation.

Believers always get the easy part in life, thinking that they will live after death, thinking that life has meaning. Well, here, for the first time, it is us the atheists who have a less tough time while reading this book. There is always a first time.


## Carrie, by Stephen King

Simply, wow. Amazing, extraordinary, deep, satisfying... I lack the proper words to describe such a masterful piece. 

One of the best novels I have ever read. So powerful, so intense... 

And so relevant today, where so many people live under extreme bullying. 

If you are one of those people who have built such a tolerance that you don't easily become moved or impressed, this is your book.

High voltage here, not for the faint of heart.


## Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

After loving The Martian, and not having read Artemis, I have found here a story as good, at least, as his first book. 

It is full of humour, full of good love for science. It is the perfect book for a science teacher and for a science student. 

It is clever, tender, funny, moving, grandiose... 

Beware of spoils from now:

Some books and films try to explicitly describe aliens and they miserably fail. Others, aware of the difficulty, leave them implicit, which is wise. But Andy Weir achieves a miracle: a very long, detailed description of an alien without failing, for the first time in history, I think.

I am expecting a very big and a very difficult film now. 

Reading this book has been an incredible experience. As if I had truly lived it.


## Crypto, by Steven Levy

I am fascinated by this book. By its scope, its relevance, its depth.

The roots of modern encryption are extremely well explained here, and the author makes an extraordinary effort to make you understand the theory, without the mathematical details, of course, otherwise he would have needed twice (or more) the number of pages, which is already a big number.

Don't expect a brief account, or lack of details. Don't expect lack of extremely critical thinking either. 

There is a strong feeling, after finishing the book, of silence. The author does an incredible effort to explain a hugely silenced story, but once the book finishes, you know the story continues up to this day, yet you don't have the author any more explaining and putting the pieces together. I would love him to extend this book until the present time.


## Hackers, by Steven Levy

What a book! It is enormous, in both size and scope. Also in engagement. 

If you love computers, you will love this book. If you don't love computers, you will love them after reading this book. The same I can say about video games.

I am amazed at the astounding level of effort that the author has done to pull all this richness of information, to place the pieces together, and to narrate them as if it was an easy story. We are not facing just an author here, but a truly masterful journalist.

A true hacker is not what you think if what you think is someone who penetrates security systems or exclusively focuses on security. This is only a (not small) part of it. The word "hacking" is much wider: it encompasses a deep curiosity for how things work, for how things can be understood, disassembled, reassembled, improved...

Who said that technology lacks spirit? Here you have the story of great people that did great things in high spirits. 

The extensive chapters about video games are especially fascinating. They made me go back into text-adventures. 


## No hay cosa como callar, de Calderón de la Barca

Nuevamente una obra que te deja helado. Esta vez hablamos de una violación en toda regla. La obra podría ser perfectamente moderna si al final no se "arreglara" de la forma en la que se arregla, que es casando a la víctima con su violador. Por lo demás, la obra es magnífica, llena de acción, con uno de los criados más agudos y brillantes que recuerde.

Últimamente pienso que para representar una obra de Calderón hoy día hay que ir con pies de plomo.

Además, no tengo claro si quiero seguir leyendo una y otra vez estas historias en las que quedan patente unos valores tan funestos.  El verso es magnífico, pero se me está atragantando.  Con Lope esto no me pasaba.  ¿O no era tan consciente de ello?


## A mathematician's Apology, by G.H. Hardy

A very short and a very naive book.

A good mathematician doing bad philosophy.

Very elitist and college-centred. 

He obtains conclusions with n < 10, which is not very rigourous...

Annoying references to Littlewood, which may be his colleague and friend, but why should we care?

According to him, a mathematician beyond 50 is unable to do anything good.  And as a proof, his book, lacking all kind of originality.

At least he is mature enough to be concerned by the war applications of math and science.

Although his conclusions are really naive.

I suppose it was the inspiration for "A mathematician's lament", but the latter has fire, while Hardy's book feels dim and has aged quite badly. 

Also, the book is recent enough to give women some credit, but he prefers to say that mathematics is a young man's game. 

Elder and women, we are not welcome to Hardy's world.

I don't say that he is wrong about age.  I just don't know. But he does not show proof.  And this is what matters.

What if, instead of being a young person's game, it is a game for which you can only last a few years?  If you begin at 20 you are dry at 40, but maybe you begin fresh at 30 and you become dry at 50, and so on. Why not?  Or perhaps it is a game in which, if you don't take care of your brain's age, you become dry at 40, but if you do, then you can still be original at 60. 

There are good things in the book, though.  I would recommend every person interested in maths to read it, and I will certainly read it again.


## A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, de Calderón de la Barca

Horrorosa, espeluznante.

El horror del honor. 

El horror de la mujer atrapada.

El ensalzamiento de hombres que matan y pasan por héroes.

Horrible, pero reveladora.

Hombres que hoy día matan a sus mujeres.

Lo mismo que el "gran Don Lope" en esta obra.

La calidad literaria de esta obra es más baja que en otras.

Pero la lectura moderna es insoportable.


## The Unix Haters Handbook

Hilarious and instructive. I did not understand everything, but enough to appreciate how evolved products compete against designed alternatives. You never know to which extent they are serious. It seems as if they really love Unix and at the same time hating it. I don't think Apple or Windows can never be alternatives to Unix, but it seems that projects previous to Unix were more promising and never took off. The tales here are not just about computer.  They are essentially human, too human.


## War of the Worlds, by H. Wells

What an intense book! You want action. Here you have an overdose. I cannot evaluate how advanced was Wells' vision. I suppose it was really advanced. But from my perspective, I have not enjoyed this book very much. The Martians' perspective is only taken into account at the very beginning. I never empathised with the protagonist or his brother. This book has not given me anything.


## Critical Mass, by Philip Ball

This is a big book: big in scope, big in quality and big in size! The author introduces many different topics with astonishing clarity and depth. He peeks your interest in an astounding variety of approaches to society from a physicist's point of view. It is extremely clever and delightful. I would need a second or even a third reading to really assimilate what this book offers. It has taken me almost a year to complete it, since each section makes you think and you need to stop and reflect. Not a book for the impatient or for the diagonal reader. But for someone searching for deep thoughts, this is your book. Of course, the author is not the author of the content explained here. The author is just a good journalist or narrator. He accompanies you in a tour of other people's works.  But oh boy, what a tour. Extreme non-linearity applied to society.  For a physicist coming from the Statistical Mechanics field, this is pure candy. People treated as irrational but strongly interacting particles. Complex phenomena arising from extremely simple, but non-linear rules. A work full of really modern, perhaps revolutionary ideas.


## El mayor monstruo del mundo, de Calderón de la Barca

Helado y aturdido. Pasmado quedo con la fuerza y la garra de esta tragedia. Es que me quedo sin palabras para describir el tormento, el dolor y la amargura del destino, y de los celos.

No sé si hay mejor obra en la literatura que esta. Al menos por momentos, se llega a lo más alto que ningún otro docto pincel llegó.


## Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

I had fun reading this book. But it is not good literature.  It feels like eating junk food: pleasure while you read it, and feeling the trash later.  I share the fascination for the 80's.  But it was a bit too much.  Clearly a junk reading.


## Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey

This is a book that will last forever in my heart.

A woman without equal, so brave, clever and with such a big soul.

I don't know how to express the enormous scope of this book. I have learned so much, but also cried so much. Cried in despair.

One of the best books I have ever read.


## El médico de su honra, de Calderón de la Barca

Estremecido me quedo de leer esto. Un horror sangriento, de celos, venganzas y malentendidos. Qué obsesión con el honor de la mujer. Y nunca el honor del hombre es puesto en cuestión, más que a través de ella. Y qué final tan extraño, lleno de injusticia y postreras amenazas a su nueva mujer. Escalofríos me dan. Si alguien escribiera un alegato reflejando el horror de la mujer no sabría hacerlo mejor que Calderón. Aunque no creo que él lo hiciera con esa intención. Que sacerdote era. O igual sí, que genio era también. Horror, horror y más horror. Patología de los celos. Reflexiones muy profundas, como la de la dieta del silencio. Una obra oscura que te deja helado.


## Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, by Nadya Tolokonnikova

This is a naive book, but naive on purpose and proud to be it. 

This is a strong reason for me to like it, being myself naive as well and also proud of being it. 

It is written in English by Nadya herself, which is also a great thing. Were this book translated or corrected by an English native, the book would be ruined. 

I love her approach, her directness, her strength, determination, wisdom and values. 
Read and Riot is a great double advise.  Under a superficial skin there is much to learn here.  Simplicity is not easily achieved, yet she manages to write in a deep and simple way. 

I wish I could know here in person and learn to jump into trash containers with her. 
I am very close to her style and way of thinking. And how I have enjoyed seeing how unshameful she is of talking despite of her acknowledged limitations. Or how she defends her shitty music and art in general. 

A brilliant book. Don't forget.  Read first and then Riot. 

No riot, no pussy.


## La gran Cenobia, de Calderón de la Barca

Una obra que va claramente de más a menos. La descripción inicial de Cenobia es apabullante, prometiendo una mujer increíble. Y lo es. Pero a medida que avanza la obra, el amor, opio de las mujeres, se apodera de ella, y acaba presa de él. Cada vez se le da menos voz hasta verse reducida a una mera esclava de su amado, que en el final muestra ser tan déspota como el propio tirano al que destrona. Una gran Cenobia a la que el amor derrota. No puedo tampoco poner a caldo a Calderón por no tener una visión tan moderna, pero da rabia, porque el inicio sí es revolucionario, con una mujer que puede con todos, que desafía al sistema hombre-céntrico. Podría haber sido mucho más increíble a los ojos de hoy, pero quizás es más actual de lo que parece, reflejando quizás lo que acabaría pasando hoy también. La obra está, por supuesto, llena de auténticas joyas. Pero no es la más brillante, y hay personajes como el de Persio, que quedan olvidados sin más.


## De un castigo tres venganzas, de Calderón de la Barca

Retomo mi tradición de leer una obra de teatro en domingo.  Ha sido una delicia leerla. Está llena de maestría, de situaciones escénicamente geniales, de metáforas preciosas, de sabiduría infinita. El trasfondo es de honor, de preservar la dignidad. Quizás tiene algo de anticuado y también algo radicalmente moderno. Los personajes femeninos son Flor, Fléride... todo flores que deben mantener su pureza y castidad. El honor lo es todo.  Pero por otra parte veo algo radicalmente interesante en la integridad, el honor, la preservación de la pureza, no la sexual, pero sí la del alma. La modernidad se jacta de igualdad, una igualdad que en el fondo no posee. Pero no se lamenta de su falta de valores nobles. Como si la nobleza no tuviera cabida. Algo tan antiguo como el honor me parece revolucionario en la mentalidad actual. Estoy esperando con fervor leer la siguiente.


## Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, by Hannah Fry

This is a nice book. Just nice. 

First of all, I expected a book about coding/programming, and I could not be more wrong. Not a single mention to coding. 

On the other hand, I learned quite interesting things, as how crime is approached from a computational view. 

I am amazed at how a lot of software is used in justice, police, etc while being closed source. And the author does not even mention this problem in an open, explicit way. 
Hannah Fry seems to me too correct, with too little passion for what she is writing. In the acknowledgements section you can find why: she admits writing this book was something forced. Perhaps she is just being sincere while other authors disguise themselves as naturals. 

In any case, I enjoyed the book, full of amazing facts and packed with questions that make you think. 

This is the 2nd book I read from this author and I would read a third without a doubt. But I would prefer that she could be less correct and more into depth and details.


# 2020


## Caballito Loco/Carnavalito, de Ana María Matute

Dos cuentos que te dejan en trance y lleno de dolor. Si volviera a ser un niño, preferiría que volvieran a cantarme que viene el Coco a comerme antes de que me lean estos dos cuentos, tan tristes. A veces, un cuento infantil puede no ser apto para adultas.


## Óscar y los hombres rana, de Carmen Kurtz

Una pequeña novela infantil en la que un niño se embarca en una aventura marítima. Es muy entretenida y en la que aparecen temas importantes, aunque estoy seguro de que la autora los habría tratado de forma diferente. Aun así vale la pena.


## A mathematician's lament, by Paul Lockhart (book)

It is difficult to exaggerate the greatness of this book. The author makes a passionate defence of what is really mathematics (an art) and how it should be properly taught in school. 

For those who have taught mathematics, this book is like a flying dagger with a tip full of a very powerful poison. The poison of a bitter truth. At the same time, the book is hilarious. 

Every teacher of mathematics should read AND put it into practise. 


## De vita beata, de Séneca

Un pequeño tratado sobre estoicismo, en el que la razón es la clave para una felicidad profunda y serena. 


## The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A true masterpiece.

Taleb is an author that does not leave me indifferent. At all. 

His style is intensely personal, something I love, and that many people, preferring a more distant and impersonal style, will be uncomfortable with.

He is also very politically incorrect, another thing that I appreciate. I am a bit sick of books that are good but a little to sterile, too correct.

A Mediterranean master that will make you think. A lot. About many things. 

I am not particularly into economy, but the philosophy here applies to a much wider scope.

I need to read it again. Perhaps more than once. I merely grasped its surface.


## The Strangest Man, the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, by Graham Farmelo

A very engaging and interesting biography of Paul Dirac. 

Having studied some of Dirac's theories, I didn't know anything about his life. And, for a shy and introverted man, what a life!

Dirac was a very relevant person. But knowing about such amount details of his life may not be so relevant. The reason I read biographies about physicists is that they  motivate me in my own research. They make me feel closer to what are my 'colleagues' of the past. Who says that social interactions, at least unidirectional ones, are only possible within the present?


## Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier

I have read this book while already not having social media accounts, so it had the effect on me of hearing about what I already know. But never underestimate the power of hearing what you know! The author gave me a lot of extra reasons not to go back to the products of those nasty companies.

The problem is not so much that they are social, or even social media. The problem is how these particular applications are designed against the society.

If you still use Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, beware of the invisible claws that are behind you.

Not having social media does not mean not being social. On the contrary! Sometimes, the moment you disconnect from them, you reconnect with yourself and with the social links you really treasure.


## Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The first book in the Incerto series, and already a masterpiece. 

Taleb is a great master of our time. I don't agree with everything he says, but so what? I don't want to agree with him: I want to make me think, and in this he succeeds enormously.

We think we know what randomness is, but we certainly don't. Randomness is way more subtle and with full of surprises.

An incredible book that I need to reread several times more. 


## Into the Magic Shop, by James R. Doty

This book was highly recommended to me and I was really disappointed by it. A huge meh. To me, it lacks depth, and being a book about meditation, it does not help you to become a better meditator in any way.


## Pet Sematary, by Stephen King

I am still shivering. This is probably the most chilling book I have ever read. It is the first book I read from this author, and oh boy, he really deserves his fame. 

I decided to read this book exclusively during night time, in bed. I spent many nights reading until really late, absolutely immersed in the story.

There is true terror here. Not the cheap terror of being scared by a sudden event that makes you jump from your sear. This is different, and infinitely deeper. This terror penetrates inside you, with its plant roots, and sucks the life out of you. 

There are many masterful moments, but most of all, I was deeply moved by the wife's sister.

The book builds its pace in a slow fashion, something that some of my friends do not like. I do like it. A slow pace like time uses to bring us into our death.


## Días extraños, de Ray Loriga

Siendo adolescente, adoraba a Ray Loriga, y leía todos los libros que conseguía de él, que fueron muchos. Su prosa poética que está de vuelta de todo sin haber ido a ninguna parte. Sus frases lapidarias. Sus miles de grises y sombras de mil inframundos.

Pero, o bien ya no sintonizo con este estilo, o quizás en este libro el autor es demasiado lapidario y a la vez poco profundo. No lo sé, pero no he acabado de sentirme como antiguamente.


## Bajo los cielos de Asia, de Iñaki Ochoa de Olza

Iñaki es una figura muy importante para mí y para una de mis mejores amigas. Nuestro maestro, que descansa bajo la nieve del Anapurna, nos abre aquí una puerta a su mundo de alturas y profundidades.

Un libro maravilloso, lleno de sabiduría y momentos muy divertidos. Iñaki fue una persona única, a la que me habría encantado conocer.


## The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton


## Beethoven, de Maynard Solomon


## Spooky Action at a Distance, by George Musser


## Stuff Maters, by Mark Miodownik


## La Metamorfosis, de Franz Kafka


## La hija de Vercingetórix, de Jean-Yves Ferri y Didier Conrad


## The Vital Question, by Nick Lane


## The Way of Zen, by Alan W. Watts


# 2019


## Sapiens, a brief history of humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari


## The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu


## How not to be wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg


## The Joy of X, by Steven Strogatz


## A mathematician's lament, by Paul Lockhart (manifesto)


## Miss Peregrine's home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs


## Pingüino perdido, de Andrei Kurkov


## Can't Hurt Me, by David Goggins


## Men of Mathematics, vol.I, Eric Temple Bell


## I, Asimov, by Isaac Asimov


## Mozart in the Jungle, by Blair Tindall


## Quiet, by Susan Cain


## Wherever you go, there you are, by Jon Jabat-Zinn


## Take Control of the Noisy Class, by Rob Plevin


# 2018


## Muerte con pingüino, de Andrei Kurkov


## Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov


## Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, by J.E. Gordon


## The Glass Cage, by Nicholas Carr


## Way of the Ascetics, by Tito Colliander


## Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman


## Storm in a Teacup, by Helen Cerski


## The Shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr


## The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation, by Hannah Fry


# 2017


## The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, by Mark Manson


## Tau zero, by Poul Anderson


## 1984, by George Orwell


## Dataclysm, by Christian Rudder


## Frankenstein , by Mary W. Shelley


## No is not enough , by Naomi Klein


## This changes everything , by Naomi Klein


## The Invention of Nature , by Andrea Wulf


## The Shock Doctrine , by Naomi Klein


## Never at Rest , by Richard Westfall


## Foundation and Earth, by Isaac Asimov


## Foundation's Edge, by Isaac Asimov


## Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov


## Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov


## Foundation, by Isaac Asimov


## Forward the Foundation , by Isaac Asimov


## Prelude to Foundation , by Isaac Asimov


# 2016


## Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ, by Giulia Enders


## The vanishing face of Gaia, by James Lovelock


## Ahsoka, by E.K. Johnston


## The extended phenotype, by Richard Dawkins


## Music in the Castle of Heaven, by John Elliot Gardiner


## Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock


## Why genes are not selfish and people are nice, by Colin Tudge


## Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury


## Congo, by Michael Crichton


# 2015


## Fleet:the complete collection, by Andrew D. Thaler


## Prepared, by Andrew D. Thaler


## The Martian, by Andy Weir


## The power of concentration, by Theron Q. Dumont


## Good food for everyone forever, by Colin Tudge


## Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, by Edward Frenkel


## Alan Turing, the Enigma, by Andrew Hodges


# 2014


## What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman


## Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis


## The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore


## The Mystery Method, by Mystery


## From eternity to here, by Sean M. Carroll


## The science of Interstellar, by Kip Thorne


## The secret life of birds, by Colin Tudge


## Jaws, by Peter Benchley


## Tirant lo Blanc, by Joanot Martorell


## Amar después de la muerte o el Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, by Calderón de la Barca

Cada lectura se disfruta al menos desde un punto de vista. En este caso esta obra me ha parecido un poco aburrida, no demasiado brillante viniendo de quien viene. Pero me toca tan de cerca la localización alpujarreña que he disfrutado imaginando todas esas escenas en uno de los principales lugares de mi infancia.  Nunca había leído una obra ambientada en tierras alpujarreñas y aquí las descripciones que se hacen de ella son bellas aunque poco específicas. Me ha gustado también que la perspectiva de Calderón no sea precisamente monárquica, y que los moriscos adquieran un protagonismo sin precedentes. Hay momentos de gran intensidad y otros de mucho humor, como cuando Al-Cuz-Cuz dice llamarse Arroz a un cristiano. Pero en general no me ha hecho vibrar demasiado. 


## Luis Pérez el Gallego, by Calderón de la Barca

Empiezo una serie de lecturas de obras de Calderón, del cual solo conocía La Vida es Sueño por haberla visto en un teatro. La historia de Luis Pérez es al principio un poco compleja pero va ganando fuerza y claridad con el tiempo. Acostumbrado a los pocos cambios de lugar de Lope, en esta obra hay constantes saltos geográficos que no me quedaban claros a la primera. Los versos son de gran calidad, aunque esperaba algo de más nivel filosófico.  Quizás no todas sus obras sean del calado de la que ya conocía...


## Las bizarrías de Belisa, de Lope de Vega

Esta es de momento la última obra de Lope que me leo tras una larga devoción al fénix del teatro. Una vez más tenemos una obra llena de gracia y versos inspirados con una historia de amores y faldas. Belisa es uno de esos grandes personajes femeninos que queriéndose superiores al amor acaban sucumbiendo en él de forma estrepitosa. Una historia divertida y ligera, que no es poco.  


## Las flores de Don Juan (Rico y pobre trocados), de Lope de Vega

Una obra magnífica llena de toques morales pero hechos con bastante gracia. Casi una utopía el pensar en un hombre con tanta integridad y en una mujer capaz de verla y apreciarla... Muy entretenida y llena de versos sublimes y verdades como puños. La historia de dos hermanos diferentes como la noche y el día, lejanos entre sí por una inmensidad. 


# 2013


## The selfish gene, by Richard Dawkins

Well, this is one of the most intelligent science books I have ever read. Its position as a sience classic is well justified. It is extremely well written and it keeps its engaging prose even through some tough and dense discussions. But the important thing is that this book has made me think a lot. The perspective of the gene is fascinating, and its implications for concepts such as altruism, cooperation or even deception is far reaching.  There is one negative thing, however: the machine is put under its proper role. I think there is more to say about machines. Genes are hugely important players, but to me are dead entities. I will soon publish a text on this topic, so keep it tuned with the publications section! And read this amazing book as soon as possible!  


## Prime Obsession, by John Derbyshire

This book is also about the prime numbers but more oriented towards the Riemman Hypothesis. It should be harder to read to a non-technical reader but I extremely enjoyed all its details. Thank God some authors are not afraid of using equations and mathematics. In this book you can grasp many details of one of the greatest unsolved problems. If you are trying to understand such problem and maybe to attempt to solve it, this is your book. 



## The Music of the Primes, by Marcus du Sautoy

Caught by the bug of the primes I dedided to read this amazing and extremely clear book about these fascinating numbers. It combines mathematical and historical background in a very pedagogical way. Once you begin you cannot stop reading it. I have become very excited not only with primes and the Riemann Hypothesis, but also with factorisation of RSA numbers and other extremely interesting topics. I feel tempted now to make a bit of research in these topics. The dream to solve the Riemann Hypothesis is too daring, though.  


## The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin

This is an excellent and not-too-brief exposition of the seven famous Clay problems, each one rewarded with a 1M$.  It is outdated in the sense that the Poincaré Conjecture is already solved by Grigori Perelman. He showed in 2003 that Poincaré was right. He, however, declined the award... The book is at a nice intermediate point between the official book, which is too short and technical, and more detailed and specific books devoted to a single problem. This is the type of books that does not teach you a lot but brings a huge motivation to seek for more. It is important to say that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and the Hodge conjecture are so difficult to even state, specially the latter, that even such a pedagogical author has a great problem explaining them.  Almost surely you will skip the last two chapters, as I more or less did. This book has been my first contact with the Riemann Hypothesis and now the bug is on me.  


## The man who loved only numbers, by Paul Hoffman

Incredible and extremely fun to read biography of one of the most important mathematicians of the XXth century, Paul Erdős (pronounced Erdish). It is difficult to find someone with a similar passion for his/her job. Most of us will consider that Erdős was a crazy-sick man, but I really admire his passion. I am divided by different passions and this makes me a lot weaker. I hope he's with the SF reading directly from the book... 

Motel Malibú, by Pablo Poveda Sánchez
Un libro muy interesante. Lo he leído porque me lo pasó un amigo que es primo del autor y me ha sorprendido el nivel de su prosa y la fuerza con la que te atrapan sus personajes. Violencia, estilo lapidario y filosofía de estar de vuelta de todo. Si lo hubiera leído siendo adolescente me habría gustado aún más.  


## The Complete Robot, by Isaac Asimov

This is more than a fantastic book. It is delightful from beginning and (mostly) to end. The last stories are masterpieces, but all of them contain the footprint of an extremely clever mind. Of course, you will fall in love with Susan Calvin. Along this collection you will cry and laugh, but most of all they will make you think. You cannot ask more from a collection of stories. The perfect book for robot lovers.  


## Querer la propia desdicha, de Lope de Vega

Otra obra magnífica de Lope en la que el Rey es un personaje principal y bastante peculiar. Enredos y más enredos. Reconozco que tras tantas obras de Lope ya estoy un poco mareado...  


## La Vengadora de las Mujeres, de Lope de Vega

Los dos primeros actos son muy brillantes. El tercero no me gustó tanto, pero las reflexiones sobre feminismo y sobre la el amor a los libros y a la razón son suficientes para leer esta obra.


## 3001: The Final Odyssey , by Arthur C. Clarke 

The beginning is so, so unexpected... Even though most of the book is about such unexpected start and not about the monoliths, etc, it is a fascinating, almost independent novel. It is the dream of every man! When the end comes and things get more serious, I find the book a bit precipitate. The end deserved a better resolution, I think, or at least better explained. However, it is most original. And the moral is to think a lot about some viruses... A very surprising aspect is that intelligent computers seem to be missing from the 3001 world. Quite a curious fact, since already at 2001 HAL was so able... In all, the 4-saga is not exactly a saga since every book you gain some things and lose others, sometimes for good, sometimes for worse, but I enjoyed a lot the whole perspective. The ET perspective is so necessary for us as an arrogant species... I hope we can find a monolith very soon, or at least a clear sign of superior species.  


## 2061: Odyssey Three , by Arthur C. Clarke


## 2010: Odyssey Two , by Arthur C. Clarke

From all the novels in the saga, this is where the real adventure happens. The location where Discovery is stuck is revisited, where HAL awaits... The character of Chandra is extremely interesting, though not developed to the point of (my) satisfaction. Europa is teeming with life and the monoliths are a bit less misterious. It was difficult to imagine how the star child could appear in a sequel. Too powerful and non-human to be bearable in a book. But Dave Bowman turns out to be a still human and interesting role. The book is extremely engaging. I had the feeling of being inside the Odyssey, soaring the solar system inside Leonov. The birth of Lucifer is what I enjoyed more.  


## 2001: A Space Odyssey , by Arthur C. Clarke

Expect a novel very faithful to the film, or viceversa.  With the novel you will probably understand more things concerning the mission of Discovery, but the great references to Nietzsche of the film are not so evident.  Probably it was Kubrik the Nietzsche fan... In short, the novel is as great, as the movie, and it is a nice shuttle to jump to the three sequels, which promise to be very exciting (now I am reading 2010 with great delight). The novel is more SETI-like than the movie as well. While Kubrik leaves the ET's silent and mysterious, Clarke explicitly describes them and we can witness their direct actions on us.  

First of all I'd like to say that this is an excellent book and I enjoyed and learned a lot by reading it.  However, don't expect a book on the question of what is life. The actual title, the origin of life, is exactly the topic that is covered. And they are two very different things. It's true that the first chapter is devoted to philosophical aspects, but the author is not really writing with philosophical depth. We can find the typical discussion (or naive denigration) of the vitalistic approach. As if language itself were not vitalist in essence, or as if vitalism were just a crackpot scientific theory and not a highly complex phenomenologic view of life by alive beings... But OK, we can skip this section and go ahead to the heart of the book, which is the origin of life, at least life as we know it (it is difficult not to be Earth-centric in this topic). The last part of the book is a presentation of one of the original theories of the author: the mutual contamination between Mars and Earth. I think it is at least a very plausible hypothesis and also very intriguing. As a bonus, you learn a lot of things concerning Mars. I think this is a very clever book written by a very clever scientist. The con is clearly the pseudophilosophical first part, but it is worth reading it.  


## The Eerie Silence, by Paul Davies

A must read if you are interested in the SETI project, either for expanding your knowledge on the topic or for an introduction. Paul Davies is not as passionate as Carl Sagan (at least he does not express it) but gives a serious an updated unaccount on the search for (not only intelligent) life outside (and not only outside) Earth.  This book has taught me many amazing facts and has made me think a lot. Highly recommended.  


## La Noche de San Juan, de Lope de Vega

Una obra muy especial para una noche muy especial. Un buen ejemplo de que el casarse por amor y no por acuerdo ya era algo que se planteaba mucho antes del romanticismo.  


## Ya anda la de Mazagatos, de Lope de Vega

Obra bastante desconocida. Es una locura de faldas.  Tenemos al mismo rey en situaciones bastante poco honrosas... 


## La Villana de Getafe, de Lope de Vega

Deliciosa obra de amor, desamor y cortejos. Sin desperdicio.  


## The End of Time, by Julian Barbour

This is a most original and interesting book. 

Written by a truly brave man, who defies both mainstream physics as well as the conventional career that forces you to pursue quantity and impact factor instead of quality and depth.  

The work and life of Dr. Barbour seems to me really exemplar and encouraging. 

Focusing on the book itself, I think we have to admit that this is not a book for everyone. I am not saying it is too tough for a non-physicist or mathematician, but there is something that I don't understand: the book is not for the general public, maybe just for a genius or two. 

So what is the point to write without equations and without more technical terms? I went through red, green and blue mists for more than 300 pages, but maybe to define probability amplitudes at the beginning would have been more suitable for the actual readers. 

I find the proposals of the author extremely interesting, and definitely I will look for Mach's work. However, I really miss the actual theory of the author. Sometimes during my reading I became confused on what is the author contribution and what is the already existent theory. And of course I miss the actual theory, with the equations, examples and more details. At least in a technical appendix! 

I have the feeling that this book is not the perfect reflection of the research of the author.  Such proposals deserve better explanations, more details, more clarity. There is some point at which you think whether the actual theory will appear on the book or not.  And such question remained unsatisfied after I finished it. 

As a preliminary work it is OK, It is full of very clever and suggestive discussions, but I think that J.  Barbour should write another book on his Platonia from scratch, without being afraid of giving more details to the reader. 

There are many science divulgation books which are very well written but with lack of original ideas.  Well, this book is just the opposite. It is pregnant with ideas but not perfectly explained as such fertility deserves. And I, of course, prefer the later! 

I am looking forward to read more of this topic from the author.  Probably I will have to go to his scientific articles. In all, The End of Time has made me think a lot, which is the best thing you can say from an author and his/her book.


## Life's Ratchet, by Peter M. Hoffmann

 This book is directly related with my PhD thesis, since both texts talk about molecular motors. So I expected a lot more from such attractive title. 

The introduction is very easy to follow and full of fascinating facts. But then the author completely twists the attitude and we are face to face to very specific discussions on biological details. 

I became quite disappointed because the author seems to think, like me, that molecular machines can be defined as minimum alive beings but he does not deepen in this issue. 

From a book with such title I expected him to talk more about what life is and how motor proteins are plugged into its definition. 

But no deep philosophy here.  

On the other hand, the technical discussion of how chemical energy is converted into mechanical work, which is the big question of the field and maybe the big question for understanding life at a fundamental level, remains as obscure as it can be. 

I think that the author darkens the question with some unfortunate decisions. The subtitle of the book is how molecular machines extract order from chaos. This is a misguiding sentence. 

The author is playing at the edge of second law violation.  Fortunately, the book explains how the consumed free energy is the ultimate responsible for such order, but this subtitle, and many sentences in the book, lead to think for some moments that motor proteins are Maxwell demons. 

While thermal motion is extremely important for these machines to work, I would not dare to make such fancy affirmations because the non-expert reader can be mislead. The order comes from the order of the energetic input and from the anisotropy and polarity of cell structures such microtubules or actin filaments, which seem to play almost no role in this book. 

This is a big mistake. Motor proteins like kinesins or myosins cannot be described without a close relation with their tracks. Such tracks are not secondary players, and this book dedicates very little to them. 

Thermal motion allows these systems to explore the phase space with more efficiency, but concepts such as diffusional search, which are common in motor proteins field, are quite dangerous because diffusion is, by definition, unbiased. The bias is introduced by other factors that are not random at all.  

Moreover, the author insists on calling chaos to thermal motion or noise. This can be a little confusing.  It is true that a general definition of chaos can include disorder, but in physics we normally distinguish between the stochastic and the chaotic. The stochastic is what we have to describe with probabilities because we know nothing of the internal variables. We do not have deterministic rules for them. It is a coarse grained approach, and it applies to thermal motion in the cell environment. 

On the other hand, chaos seems to me a word more appropriated to deterministic systems where there is an exponential divergence between two histories that are very similar at their initial conditions. I would have not used the therm chaos in the context of this book, but noise, stochasticity or simply undeterministic motion.  

Finally, it is significant to read the description of the kinesin-1 motor mechanism. In such description, the phantom of second-law violation flies close. The author arrives to the paroxysm of saying that "What is striking, however, is that the main source of energy, the hydrolysis of ATP, does not seem to be directly used for locomotion."
To me, this is a defect of many models of such motors, that they rely so much on the power of thermal motion that they underestimate the role of ATP, which has to be the key player. 

Of course, the author considers ATP as a crucial player, but not to the degree that it deserves. For example, if one head of the kinesin performs a diffusional search, why such searches is almost always directed to the plus-end of the microtubule? He mentions the tilted profile of the microtubule in a very obscure fashion, when such important thing would deserve more pages of the book than any other topic. 

I do not blame the author, though. He seems to be close to some researchers who strongly rely on the role of the noise but not on deterministic forces. It is still a controversial subject and maybe the author could have been more open to discuss other alternative theories which are more deterministic (but with thermal noise as a key player). 

To summarise, I enjoyed reading the book, mostly the first half, but I think that a non-expert reader can extract wrong conclusions, or at least clear conclusions on a topic that today remains dark. 

Finally, from a philosophical point of view, this book is very deficient.  This topic is too important to avoid deep discussions. As it is typical when some physicists write about life, they naively make fun of vitalism and celebrate technology without providing deep conceptual discussions. 


## The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G.J. Whitrow

To me, working on the subject of time, this book is a must. 

It is referenced by almost everyone working in the subject. Moreover, the author is also the author of Time in History, a magnificent book already cited here. 

It has very different parts, each one associated with the role of time in different disciplines such philosophy, physics, biology or even psychology. 

It is clearly a formal work, not intended for a general reader.  Do not expect revolutionary theories or proposals. It is a book that reviews the mainstream, even though the discussion on Zeno's paradoxes is really surprising. 

In short, it is a classic but only for those with strong background in physics, since the author will not avoid any equation. 

I would have enjoyed more a book exclusively dedicated to a physical/philosophical viewpoint.  


## La prueba de los amigos, de Lope de Vega

De las mejores obras de Lope, sobre todo el primer acto, el cual es extremadamente brillante. El tema principal, la amistad, es tratado con gran profundidad y mantiene una actualidad evidente. El personaje cómico, Galindo, es de lo más ingenioso a la vez que entrañable. Un canto a la generosidad y un aviso para los que se lanzan a ella.  Magnífica en todos los sentidos.  


## El Arenal de Sevilla, de Lope de Vega

Esta es una obra bastante difícil, sobre todo al principio, donde la acción y las referencias específicas me hicieron perder un poco. Más adelante se retoma el hilo con facilidad, el cual versa sobre amor, disfraces y engaños una vez más.  


## La Esclava de su Galán, de Lope de Vega

Un ejemplo de hasta dónde puede alguien autohumillarse para perseguir a su amor. Y también una muestra de lo difícil que es que otros aprecien ese sacrificio.


## Los Melindres de Belisa, de Lope de Vega

Belisa es un personaje para volverse loco. De esos que adoras en escena pero al que odiarías en la vida real. La obra está llena de engaños y equívocos. La oscuridad final es buenísima.  


# 2012


## Por la puente, Juana, de Lope de Vega

Una obra de costumbres, amor y honor. Los protagonistas viven como personajes dentro de otros, huyendo de su pasado más reciente.


## El premio del bien hablar, de Lope de Vega

Una comedia tardía en la producción de Lope. En ella vemos a Don Juan defender el honor de las mujeres hasta el final. Como siempre, el criado es el que te hace reír. En este caso es Martín, el cual sufre cierto percance con un Mastín... Toda la obra dentro de una sola casa, escondiéndose mútuamente, lo cual da una fuerza escénica enorme. Algunos versos son impagables, como los que regala Leonarda a su padre para defender su libertad de alma y cuerpo.  


## Santiago el Verde, de Lope de Vega

Amoríos y requiebros en la fiesta de Santiago el Verde.  Las escenas de los sastres fingidos son tremendas.  


## El Villano en su Rincón, de Lope de Vega

Esta es una obra magistral. Quizás la que más me ha gustado de Lope hasta la fecha. Una lección de libertad. 


## El Sembrar en Buena Tierra, de Lope de Vega

Una obra sencilla y llena de sabiduría. Deliciosa y cándida. Perfecta para una mañana de domingo.  


## Los Milagros del Desprecio, de Lope de Vega

Excelente obra. Y sencilla, lo cual la hace perfecta para una representación casera. Un nivel de perfección similar al del Perro del Hortelano.  


## La Moza de Cántaro, de Lope de Vega

De esta obra sorprende mucho que online se encuentra en cinco actos y sin embargo en mi libro Aguilar del 1946 solo hay tres. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles, el encargado de las notas en mi edición, afirma que la versión en cinco actos es una refundición de Cándido María Trigueros. Por eso sorprende que en la Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes haya cuatro entradas pero todas para la versión refundida, la cual a primera vista es casi totalmente diferente. Yo he leído la supuestamente original. Me resulta increíble que esta fuera la obra númuero 1500 del autor. Escribir tantas obras es simplemente una bestialidad. Por otro lado, la obra en sí es muy hermosa pero no de las mejores. Y el final es demasiado precipitado. A veces con Lope esto es una constante, pero en esta obra todo se resuelve en demasiado poco tiempo. 


## El Acero de Madrid, de Lope de Vega

Muy buena obra de amoríos y requiebros. 

Leyéndola me entretuve en ir apuntando todas las conexiones relevantes entre los personajes y me di cuenta de la enorme cohesión que esconde la dramaturgia. 

Hay doce personajes, y el número (aproximado) de conexiones de cada uno es: Belisa=9, Lisardo=8, Teodora=7, Prudencio=7, Marcela=6, Beltrán=6, Riselo=6, Octavio=6, Prudencio=5, Leonor=4, Salucio=3 y Gerardo=3. Los últimos tres son criados y aun así tienen mucha conectividad. 

Además de esta cohesión hay muchas simetrías interesantes, como la de Lisardo-Belisa, Riselo-Teodora y Beltrán-Leonor. 

Quizás no es la mejor obra de Lope, pero un análisis superficial ya revela una gran maestría.  


## Ringworld, by Larry Niven

A must read of the Science Fiction genre. I enjoyed it very much. I became fascinated with the role of Teela Brown, even though the luck theory is a fallacy. But it is interesting how you can follow such a lucky girl and interpret all events under her luck. I became a bit disappointed near the end, though. I think the book deserved a much better end, since all the previous action was nearly perfect. 


## Elements, Book I, by Euclid

This is a masterpiece I have always heard of but never read. I decided to follow each proposition with paper, compass and a not marked ruler. You need calm in order to follow the last propositions as they accumulate as the book advances. But it is worth trying. After some time I will try with book II.  



## El Castigo sin Venganza, de Lope de Vega

Al principio me ha costado entrar, pero acabas entrando del todo, y entonces el dolor te deja clavado. Terrible, cruel y a la vez con un lirismo que espanta de lo bueno que es. En vida de Lope solo se representó una vez. 



## El Anzuelo de Fenisa, de Lope de Vega

Por algún motivo me gustan especialmente las obras de Lope ambientadas en Italia. Esta es enormemente luminosa. El personaje de Fenisa es una delicia. Muy entretenida, perfecta para representar hoy día.  



## El Marqués de las Navas, de Lope de Vega

Excelente obra llena de misterio. La temperatura sube mucho al principio y luego desciende hasta una frialdad extrema. Escalofríos me dieron al acabarla.  



## A World Without Time, the forgotten legacy of Gödel and Einstein, by Palle Yourgrau

This is not a book for everyone. You need to know more than a bit from Einstein's theories of relativity (GR and SR) and from Gödel's famous theorems.

 The author tries to explain a little bit about them but is not enough for the inexpert reader. However, you can read chunks from it and enjoy the anecdotes from these two geniuses of mathematics and physics. 

Furthermore, the required philosophical level is high as well, as Gödel was even more a philosopher than a mathematician (according to the author).

However, if you are able to understand it (and I recognize that the parts from Gödel theorems was very hard to me) you can enjoy this book.

First, it is a romantic attempt to give justice to the figure of Gödel in the fields of philosophy and physics.  Second, it comes as a great surprise (to me) that these two brilliant minds were so close to each other. 

I like how they diverged from mainstream research, pursuing very high goals, how they denied quantum interpretations and how they wanted to deeply understand the world. 

We all have to thank Palle Yourgrau for writing this, for it is thanks to people like him that important facts are not flushed by the toilet of time. 

Not an easy book. I would add it is sad in many respects, but I really enjoyed it.  

As for the title, this book fell in my hands because of my research on the topic of time. But time is not the only main topic of it. However, it is of relevance, since Gödel contributed with a very important result concerning General Relativity. 

At some extreme rotating universes, there can be closed time-like curves, which allow a time travel, but which means in fact that time as we understand it is not compatible with this. Well, this is an important result. 

However, my point of view is that it tells more for the probable fail of General Relativity at extreme conditions than for the real universe and time.  However, this is still an open topic and the ideas of Gödel should be seriously taken into account. 

Sadly, mainstream colleagues of his time and from current days do not seem to be opened to his ideas. But I prefer to trust a genius like Gödel than some mainstream charlatans.



## La truita cremada de Claudi Mans

Aquest llibre me'l va regalar fa un any la Laia Haurie, doctora en Química, per un amic invisible. I a la fi vaig decidir llegir-ho. Ho he fet mentre dinava, un capítol (un article) cada dia. Ho he trobat molt bo, brillant i divertit. Hi ha articles com el de la taula periòdica que m'han fet plorar de riure. Altres, com el de rentar les camises a l'Índia, m'ha fet pensar. M'ha semblat una  bona obra de divulgació amb  bon humor i metàfores  interessants. Potser m'ha sobrat el discurs sobre la natura i la química, article 22, perquè sembla que era  confús i dubtós, però tota la resta està molt bé. 

Creo que hay versión en castellano, aunque aún no imagino cómo se ha podido traducir el examen sobre la tabla periódica... Ambas versiones se pueden conseguir en algunas librerías o bien solicitándolo al autor (cmans@ub.edu).



## El Caballero de Olmedo, de Lope de Vega

Se me acaban los adjetivos para describir el asombro que me producen las obras de Lope de Vega. Esta obra es asombrosa, una auténtico canto al amor. Leyéndola me he llenado de risas, lágrimas, impotencia y dolor. También me ha sorprendido la crudeza con la que Lope habla de las matanzas de toros en Medina. La sensibilidad y el lirismo que tiene para el amor y para la flor más delicada y la sequedad con la que describe unas fiestas tan sanguinarias. Ya sé que en su época no era corriente mostrar compasión con los toros, pero Lope no era alguien común y realmente me esperaba una descripción de otro calado. De todas formas la obra es apabullante y llena de una sensibilidad que muchos sensibles quisieran. De haber leído esta obra en mi adolescencia habría combustionado de forma instantánea.  



## Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, de Lope de Vega

Obra excepcional, con una fuerza escénica fuera de lo normal. Imagino la enorme fuerza que debe desprender la pintura en casa del pintor. Las escenas con los campesinos durmiendo en la calle son memorables. Supongo que hay la tentación de ver una moral que haga al Comendador el malo y a Peribáñez el bueno, pero al menos bajo mi punto de vista no está tan claro. Desde luego, el Comendador tiene amor puro, aunque métodos torpes y poco nobles, pero Peribáñez destila un amor mucho más mediocre, mediocre como él mismo y su condición. Lo que pasa es que habla bajo el increíble verso de Lope de Vega y eso le quita la mediocridad a cualquiera. Basta leer justo al principio las preciosas declaraciones de amor que se hacen los novios para constatarlo. El final me parece muy abrupto desde el punto de vista del Comendador. 


## About Time (Einstein's Unfinished Revolution), by Paul Davies

This is a very nice introductory book to the topic of time. It is very well explained and it's not boring, except during the discussions of time travels. I usually get bored when the subject becomes too speculative. At the beginning I didn't know that the author was aware of the work by Huw Price. The objections of Price concerning double standard approaches deserves much more attention.  The author simply mentions it very briefly, and then proceeds to discuss other speculative things. He says that Price has attacked the physicists. Well, this is unfair.  He reasoned some arguments againsts some theories. This is not an attack, and it is not a good approach to be such a corporatist. The author only mentions the very serious reasoning of Price and spends pages and pages on extremely speculative aspects. By the way, he says that parallel universes are an escape for Price objections, but this is not enough. I expected more in this aspect. It is worth mentioning that Price says in his book of the Archimedes point that Hawking never replied to him. Frankly, Price's is still the best book I have read on the topic of time arrow and similar. Paul Davies does not talk on the initial entropy as the target problem for the arrow of time, which is pretty incredible. However, I consider it as a very nice book, very entertaining and engaging. One point to Davies over Price is that Davies discuss the case of kaons! In order to understand the examples from the quantum chapter you may go for an introduction to double slit experiments first. Otherwise it can be hard to follow. 



## Los Novios de Hornachuelos, de Lope de Vega

Es una obra muy divertida. Esta es de las que el Rey es presentado como un auténtico héroe. Lope parece tener una visión muy bipolar sobre los reyes... Me gusta sobre todo la forma en que se odian los novios nada más verse.  ¡Cuántas parejas habrán habido así!


## Flatterland, by Ian Stewart

I cannot recommend this book. I became extremely bored reading it.

The title reads "Like Flatland, only more so".  Well, this is far from being true. This text tries to be a sequel to the great classic Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott.

This 1884 novel is a must for those of you who don't know it.  And don't expect the movies based on it be neither faithful nor better. It is a brilliant, direct and short book, with scientific and political insight. 

However, Flatterland is a must-not. It is a boring, long and an only scientific oriented book (not to say that some topics are so speculative that cannot be called science yet). 

It tries to deal with female revolution but the narrative is very poor. 

One of the first things an author should learn is not to build god-like characters, i.e. protagonists which are perfect, emotionless and do not change through the course of the story. Here the Space Hopper is a detestable character, who does not display any feeling and consequently does not attract the reader at all. 

After a good start, with the story beginning at Flatland, Vikki is almost kidnapped by the I-know-everything stupid ball, leaving the whole family worried when he could have left a letter from the very beginning. Sometimes he is even very disgusting with Vikki in some replies. Vikki is too good to be true. She is kidnapped but after all she wants to learn all the time. She is the only one having some feelings, but even she is not interesting at all. 

At the end, when some interest is recovered, the book ends abruptly. So there is not an interesting story because, among other things, there is no story. An odyssey is not enough to build a novel. It needs a conflict at least! 

If I want to learn science I prefer to read a more serious book. If this is to be a novel, then I need to see conflicts as the gears of every decent novel or literature work. 

The author, Ian Stewart, is totally an amateur.  

Concerning more technical details, I would add some comments. First, I purchased the book thinking that the book was about dimensions. The author sometimes confuses dimensions with degrees of freedom, or sometimes completely forgets the topic of dimensions, which is sad.  I expected a true sequel to the original, that is, exploring more spatial dimensions. 

The chapter with fractals is understandable, but there are a lot of things to explore when you jump from 3 to more than 3 spatial dimensions. What is the criterion for the topics covered in the book? It seems pretty random and not faithful to the title. 

Furthermore, the topics are not well explained.  The author tries the enigmatic style of Lewis Carroll but only achieves confusion with no style. 

Some names are funny, this is the only fun you can get. 

The reviews included in the book make me think that they don't read the book but the first few chapters. Nature journal says it's "a superb sequel" or "entertaining", which is very far from being true. Make us a favour and let's not associate this poor text as the sequel of the great Flatland. It could be like Flatland, only much worse so.
By the way, A²; comes from Abbott Abbott=A²!



## Porfiar hasta morir, de Lope de Vega

Mucho podrían aprender los amantes hoy en día de esta obra tan buena. De Nuño y por supuesto de Macías. Ser el hombre perfecto para Clara, mujer perfecta a su vez para él, pero llegar tarde, ¡qué barrera tan aparentemente absurda y a la vez tan grande! A veces pienso que uno es todavía joven en tanto que puede sentir lo que siente un hombre como Macías. Un caballero virtuoso en todas las facetas que simplemente llega a deshora para ser desbancado por otro caballero mediocremente notable. Esta obra hará hervir tu sangre. Quizás estés de acuerdo conmigo en que podría haberse titulado con igual acierto "Castidad hasta matar".


## La Niña de Plata, de Lope de Vega

Mucho se insiste en el paralelismo entre esta obra y La Estrella de Sevilla, pero eso poco importa a un lector no académico como yo. La Niña de Plata es una obra maravillosa. Con una resolución nunca vista en toda la literatura que conozco. El personaje de la Niña es un caramelo para cualquier actriz con un poco de ambición y buen gusto. Nuevamente descubro cómo Lope hace palidecer a cualquier dramaturgo contemporáneo, por bueno que este sea. Cuando algo tan bueno está tan bien dicho, lo que viene luego parece poca cosa. Todavía me quedan muchas obras de Lope por leer, pero ya puedo decir que ningún autor que conozca me ha dado tanto placer. Y eso que el teatro no es para leerlo, sino para darle vida. ¡Ojalá los grupos de teatro aficionados (y profesionales) rescataran estas joyas en vez de dar tanto bombo a mediocres actuales! Parece que Lope es como la Niña de Plata, una joya brillante que con el tiempo, si no se cuida, ennegrece, pero que guarda su tesoro para el que quiera desoxidarlo.  


## Ciencia e Hipótesis (Science and Hypothesis) by Henri Poincaré

Original title: La Science et l'Hypothèse.

This book, first published in 1902, is very special in a lot of ways. 

First, Poincaré itself. He was one of the best mathematicians of all times, and reading a text by such an incredible mind is always a big responsibility. As a reader, you need to give your best. I have studied some theorems from him in the past, like the one of eternal return, and the depth of his thinking is astonishing.  However, this book is intended for the public reader and it is not as tough as one of his technical works. 

He proposes and suggests many relevant things in such a short space that you get the feeling of being shaked by a genius but without having solved anything at all. He leaves for the (future) reader the solutions. Of course, there are some parts that are a bit old-fashioned, or put in euphemistic words, of hystorical value. However, most of his analysis is still interesting and revolutionary in some way. 

What I liked most is the way he asks himself about deep concepts like number, magnitude, mass, force...  without giving room for faith. Most of the physicist I know are complete believers. They do not lose time by thinking about such philosophical topics... But some laws are in fact definitions, like the F=ma. And some quantities, like mass, are a comfortable ways of expressing a relationship, not absolute parameters given by God. 

The whole book would be a cure for many scientists which behave like monks. 

It is impossible to make an overview of such a miscellaneous work. However, what is important is his attitude towards science. Unravelling hidden hypotheses is essential for the good of science. We need awoken minds like Poincaré. Today more than 110 years ago. 

In particular I love his analysis of probabilities, where you discover that its definition depends on itself!  Is such a loose concept the most fundamental measurable quantity of quantum mechanics? Poincaré's book can be a source of incredible inspiration. 

Let me finish with a part that I think is very relevant today: "We may conceive of ordinary matter as either composed of atoms, whose internals movement escape us, our senses being able to estimate only the displacement of the whole; or we may imagine one of those subtle fluids, which under the name of ether or other names, have from all time played so important a role in physical theories. Often we go further, and regard the ether as the only primitive, or even as the only true matter. The more moderate consider ordinary matter to be condensed ether, and there is nothing startling in this conception; but others only reduce its importance still further, and see in matter nothing more than the geometrical locus of singularities in the ether. Lord Kelvin, for instance, holds what we call matter to be only the locus of those points at which the ether is animated by vortex motions. Riemann believes it to be locus of those points at which ether is constantly destroyed; to Wiechert or Larmor, it is the locus of the points at which the ether has undergone a kind of torsion of a very particular kind. [...] Does our ether actually exist? We know the origin of our belief in the ether. " 


## El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid y El Infanzón de Illescas, de Lope de Vega

Leer esta obra es como leer un sueño. Hiperrealista y surrealista al mismo tiempo, es decir, con mucho sentido y con ninguno a la vez. Se contrasta el lirismo exacerbado de unos con el verso prosaico (si es que tal cosa tiene sentido) de otros. Uno cree estar en una obra lorquiana tipo El público por momentos. Las escenas en las estancias del rey, actos II y III, son una locura escénica. Puertas y más puertas que conectan una infinidad de salas donde suceden hechos completamente oníricos. Como en todo sueño, la unidad global va basculando hacia delante, acompañando a la acción. Aunque por supuesto existe un motivo principal. Tan horrible, quizás, que Lope decidió vestirlo con fantasía. Me sorprende la imagen del Rey Don Pedro en comparación con los reyes de otras obras citadas anteriormente. Este es más maduro. O más tardío... En cualquier caso se trata de un Rey que todavía puede demostrar un valor real, no como los que vemos ahora.  Aunque parece que la sensibilidad más allá de las fronteras de su piel es algo de lo que han carecido y carecen casi todos. Hay escenas memorables, como la de las broncas o la de Don Tello pasando de sala en sala. La Sombra es, cómo no, la que da relieve al conjunto. 


## Lo Cierto por lo Dudoso, de Lope de Vega

Quizás no es el argumento más elaborado de Lope, pero sin duda es una de sus obras más líricas. La calidad del verso llega a cotas insospechadas. Y el clímax, en el que el título cobra sentido, es realmente hermoso. Un título solo para valientes, para personas que se lanzan a sentir de verdad. 


## La Estrella de Sevilla, de Lope de Vega

De momento es una de las mejores que he leído de Lope. Es redonda en todos los sentidos. Y el final... ¡qué final!  Si estás buscando una obra para representar con no muchos personajes y que sea efectiva, esta puede ser una buena candidata. 


## The Planet of the Apes (La Planète des singes), by Pierre Boulle

Every movie is different, and so is the novel. It is an extremely suggestive and intriguing book where we can find some chapters of enormous beauty and other of extreme crudity. Read this novel and think about the experiments we perform on our closest brothers. (Do not continue reading if you do not want the novel to be spoiled). I think the author is trying to suggest that Soror is, in fact, the Earth, just as the 1968 film. Not only there are the same species, the same atmosphere, etc but the star Betelgeuse is red and big, exactly as the Sun is supposed to be when it will begin to be run out of fuel. And there is a moon, even though is smaller. Perhaps due to asteroid collisions? The continents are different, but after thousands of years the continental drift may have played its part. I think the author is suggesting that the travel to Soror is in fact a travel to the distant future Earth, while the trip back to Earth brings them to a nearer future. By the way, I find the role of the professor Antelle very intriguing, since there is no explanation for his transformation. I like the love between Ulysse and Nova. They cannot communicate by words by they fall in love. Love, which needs no reason or science. Maybe this is what makes professor Antelle to act as he does. The book is full of hints to open ends and winks to restless readers. 



## Las Paces de los Reyes y Judía de Toledo, de Lope de Vega

Una obra muy enigmática llena de detalles exquisitos y momentos muy oscuros. El primer acto parece una pequeña obra separada, casi un preludio, y los dos restantes son el verdadero núcleo de la obra. No obstante el conjunto es extremadamente entretenido. El personaje de Raquel, bajo mi punto de vista, no tiene parangón en toda la literatura que conozco. Aparece tan poco pero con tanta fuerza... La evolución es trágica en el gran sentido de la palabra. El amor del rey está expresado en toda su entraña, lo cual resalta enormemente en un fondo costumbrista y artificial.  Francamente me parece increíble (en el buen sentido) que Lope de Vega se atreviera a poner en boca de un rey semejantes palabras y acciones. Es, en resumen, una obra desconcertante. Una joya para descubrir por ti mismo. 



## A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking

As I am a physicist involved in the topic of time, I cannot put myself under the perspective of a non-physicist reader, which is the target of this book. But there is a main issue that is important even for the average reader: the title is misleading because it is not a history of time. The topic of time is poorly covered. This is a book about cosmology, and as such, it is quite out-of-date, since very significant changes have occurred in the last 15 years. (For example, the accelerated expansion of the universe, which is not mentioned at least in my 2011 edition). If you are looking for an excellent book on the arrows of time I recommend you Time's Arrow and the Archimedes' Point by Huw Price. It is a bit tough but probably the best text on the arrow of time that I know of. For the history of time measurement there is an amazing book entitled Time in History by  G.J. Whitrow, which I strongly recommend.


## The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge

This is a wonderful book that everyone should read in order to learn incredible things about our green brothers and how important they are.


## El mejor alcalde, el Rey, de Lope de Vega

Deliciosa obra en la que Pelayo te hará reír de lo lindo, Sancho te hará sentir y Elvira llorar.


## Valor, Fortuna y Lealtad, de Lope de Vega

Esta es la segunda parte de Los Tellos de Meneses. A mi parecer es mucho mejor que la primera. Tiene más ritmo, humor y profundidad dramática. El conjunto de las dos obras es realmente bueno. Me encantaría ver en escena los cambios constantes de vestuario...


## Total immersion, by Terry Laughlin

This is a very interesting book if you are an adult trying to learn to swim well. First, it is important to mention that it only discuss front crawl stroke. Maybe some things are applicable to backstroke, but for breast and fly strokes this book is not of great help. The main point is that remarks the importance of the efficiency when you swim. And in order to increase this efficiency we learn that arms and foot are not so important as power sources.  Instead, a good equilibrium and a hip rotating-stroke is more effective. The author discusses very common mistakes among amateur swimmers trying to improve the efficiency of swimming by a reduction of drag instead of by enhancing only endurance or strength. I really enjoyed, even though I got lost in many descriptions of the exercices. It is very difficult to explain a swimming exercise with words!  But I got the videos and all makes sense now. 


## Los Tellos de Meneses, de Lope de Vega

Esta obra es magnífica. Te transporta a un pasado rural en el que Tello el Viejo adolece de una curiosa dualidad económica. Elvira desciende de la nobleza para ponerse a servir en un acto de lo más valiente. Lope no se dedica a mostrar personajes de alto linaje enfermos de hemofilia, sino que en su caso lo real es real, incluso dentro de lo ficticio. El personaje de Tello joven no me acaba de gustar. Está a la altura de los demás cortesanos. 


## White Fang, by Jack London

This is probably the best book I've ever read, together with The Call of the Wild, by the same author. I am sick of the Disney-like approach to other animals that act and think as if they were humans. I am also sick of usual people, even some philosophers, who consider that they are almost automata. Some months ago I read The Wolf by Joseph Smith and he showed to be completely unable to put himself under the skin of a wolf or other creatures.  On the other hand, The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands is an interesting book that can complement White Fang in many ways. But the two wolf-related works by London are really superior. He is able to transmit you the mind and the spirit of other animals without humanizing and without dehumanizing them. These are two superb and symmetrical stories that will spring upon you! 



## Los Prados de León, de Lope de Vega

Una historia de amor cruzada entre Nise y Nuño, o de cómo la nobleza crece mejor en el campo... 


## La Dama Boba, de Lope de Vega

Magnífica obra donde se muestra cómo el amor enciende la luz del ingenio, aunque a muchos parece que se la apague.  Estar dotado, ya sea de lucidez o de dote, es algo que no es constante. En cualquier caso, Lope demuestra una vez más haber amado mucho. 



## Las Famosas Asturianas, de Lope de Vega

Si ya conoces las andaduras de Sancho Panza es hora de ver en acción a Doña Sancha, una heroína increíblemente moderna. Es muy interesante leer a Lope en un castellano que ya para él era (quizás irónicamente) antiguo. 


## El Perro del Hortelano, de Lope de Vega

Maravillosa obra filosófica en lo amoroso y amorosa en lo filosófico. Es inevitable pensar en la fiel película que hizo Pilar Miró. El final, como casi siempre en Lope, me parece algo precipitado. Pero el lirismo vuela a alturas increíbles. 


## Fuenteovejuna, de Lope de Vega

Aunque es archifamosa nunca antes la había leído, y no me ha decepcionado. Me ha parecido muy contemporánea, al menos en potencia, pues los que hoy en día gobiernan nos están inflando las narices y pueden acabar como el Comendador. Me ha parecido que tiene cierta relación con Las Bacantes de Eurípides, más que nada por el linchamiento (por decirlo de forma suave) colectivo.  También me ha parecido curioso que no se diga el tópico de "Fuenteovejuna, todos a una". Esto es como lo de "Tócala otra vez, Sam, en Casablanca...