Bought in New York, in Forbidden Planet 2025.

Suggested by Nick Sousanis in an interview, author of Unflattening. Maybe referenced in that book.

I liked very much how the story telling flows with imagenative comic techniques. I am not sure how much of the essence of the litaray work from Paul Auster is respected or enhanced by the medium, though, so I will have to read the original work.

But I loved the craf from the authors, in some cases reminding me of Asterios Polyp, and loved too the depictions of New York and the references to philosophy of language.

I thought it could be related to Philosophy of Mind but it is fundamentally about bilology and neuroscience.

I thought it would be more about phylosophy but it was purely neurobiology and neuroscience, how parts of our body and chemicals interact in particular to generate emotions and the concept of self.

The author starts with patients who have suffered accidents and lost part of their prefrontal cortex, so that they cannot experience emotions. These people struggle in decision making and the whole argument is about somatic markers of emotions and how emotions are useful to decision making. Cold rationality is not better.

Currently reading.

On Engineering Experience, Developer Experience, measuring productivity and AI. From a researcher and the DX founder.

Una obra ambientada en la Barcelona de la postguerra, con una gran presencia de la contienda, pero sin rencor. Andrea, una chica de 18 años, de pueblo, se muda con su familia a Barcelona, a la calle Aribau, para ir a la universidad. Vive con abuela, sus tíos Juan (el pintor), Román (el músico casado con Gloria y con un bebé), Angustias, y la criada Antonia (que también cuida de Trueno, el perro). De la universidad conoce a Ena y otros jóvenes, algunos que van de bohemios.

Me ha gustado mucho la manera de explicar la historia y describir el ambiente, todo narrado por Andrea.

La edición también muy cuidada, con textos adicionales al final.

Ganó el primer premio Nadal y la autora tenía 23 años cuando la escribió.

I liked it very much.

It is a very old Sci-Fi novel, published in 1969, and some things may be obsolete, but the relationship between the protagonist and the idea of a human-like civilisation trying to connect markets in the galaxy, is not foreign. The Ekumen, founded by the Hainish people.

The progragonist is a black man from the earth how has travelled years to get to Winter, or Gethen for the locals, a hostile planet where the inhabitants are asexual, all alike. Every year or so the get into kemmer, a month where masculine of femenine attributes are acquired, seemingly randomly, and they have a drive to sex. When they are not in kemmer they are in somer.

“The king is pregnant” is a shocking phrase. Anyone can be pregnant and anyone can bear children. Children are brought up by the group.

It is considered the first feminist novel.