The Curious Curator's Book Blog

This book aims to be a thorough guide to the principles of exhibition designing, from trade fairs to museums and galleries.

While it touches upon many interesting themes, I felt that it was lacking in several areas - the information is a bit disorganized and for the most part it doesn't go into detail about the things that are being explained. A lot of the schematics, while visually impressive, lacked explanations and context, and most of the times the labels were so small they were unreadable. But the biggest problem I had with the book is that it makes no apparent separation between trade / commercial exhibitions and art exhibitions. Say what you will, I'm not so cynical as to think that what you're hoping to reach with an art exhibition in a museum is the same as from a trade fair exhibition where you sell products.

Still, this was fairly useful in giving an introduction to aspects of design I didn't know a lot about.

A book about the wonderful work of Dave McKean for the Sandman comics. There really isn't much else to say - if you love Dave McKean's artwork you will love this book. Each cover has a story, and all the little details will have you stare at the images for a long time. It's interesting to see how his work evolved over the years, and the commentary from both the artist and Neil Gaiman (who also wrote a short story for the book) is funny and insightful.

Definitely worth it if you're a Sandman fan. If you're not, I'm sure you'll be interested in checking it out after you read this book.

Um conjunto de crónicas de Pedro Mexia publicadas na revista NS e agora reunidas em livro. A escrita de Pedro Mexia é lúcida e económica, com um tom caracteristicamente português de melancolia, um pessimismo latente de alguém desiludido e ao mesmo tempo fascinado pela vida. As crónicas, pessoais e nostálgicas, tratam de assuntos tão diversos como música, cinema, relacionamentos e experiências de vida. Gostei particularmente de "Os Filisteus", dedicado àqueles que, detestando ler bons livros ou ver bons filmes (algo que por si só não é tão problemático assim), procuram provar a sua superioridade sobre os que gostam e que apelidam constantemente de "pseudo-intelectuais".

Infelizmente, a maioria das crónicas pareceu-me excessivamente curta para o potencial de cada ideia, algo compreensível tendo em conta o medium para o qual foram escritas, mas que se torna incomodativo em formato de livro. Ainda ssim, foi uma boa introdução ao trabalho deste escritor, e fiquei com curiosidade para ler mais.

I first heard of Giorgio Agamben during an art criticism class. We were discussing the definition of contemporary art, and the essay in this book come up, which piqued my interest about it.

I was pleasantly surprised with this book. It's a collection of essays on varied topics, from nudity (which gives the book its title), to Kafka, to identification methods and their influence in people. All of them were very interesting and mentioned facts and thoughts that I hadn't heard of or considered before.

Highly recommended as a thought provoking book.

Brassaï (or Gyula Halász) was a Hungarian photographer and artist in the early to mid-twentieth century, working mostly in Paris. He was part of the art scene there, and worked closely with the surrealists (even if he never considered himself to be one). I became acquainted with his work as a Photography student, but this was the first book I read that was entirely dedicated to him.

His photographic work is simply amazing. It is visually stunning, layered with possible interpretations. The historical interest is also considerable. Brassaï photographed everything, from people to landscapes, and the images provide a fascinating glimpse into Parisian life a century ago. The essay at the start of the book wasn't as great as the images, unfortunately. Maybe there was something lost in translation (my copy is at the same time in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) but the writing style was rather weak, with confusing sentences and disparate verb conjugations.

Still, well worth looking into, and a good introduction to the work of this wonderful photographer.

After reading this I realized one thing. It is much easier to write a review about a book you didn't like than about one that deeply touched you.

For once I'm not going to describe the plot, since I can't think of a way to do it without over simplifying it. Suffice to say that Life of Pi may not be for everyone - it's not, after all, just a simple story, and at times it's closer to philosophy than fiction - but in the right state of mind, it can be breathtaking. It certainly was for me. This book is about transformation, faith, humanity, survival. The writing is beautiful, equal parts crude and delicate. I honestly can't think of anything else to say other than "read with an open mind". Highly recommended.

I bought this book hoping it would help me understand a little better the economics of the internet world. There's no doubt that the internet was built around the concept of Free, but like with every other topic I'm interested in, I missed reading a systematic study about what (if anything) had changed, and how. This book does a decent job at it, but it wasn't perfect.

It gives a historical account of Free, the different meanings it can have, and how people react to it. It goes into the web world and those that have benefited from it, and those who have not, and why. It starts off well, but after a while, I felt like I was reading the same thing over and over again. It gets better again towards the end, but I struggled to keep going in the middle since not much was being added to the discussion.

Also, this felt very much like a one-sided account. Of course Free is good for many things and there is no way you can compete with it, but that doesn't mean everyone benefits from it. The author gives as an example the singer Sheryl Crow, who according to him, should be thankful more people are listening to her songs for free, because they can afterward buy tickets to her concerts and merchandise. But he never talks about movies (and other industries, but I'm using this as an example). What should the movie industry do, if everyone expects to always see movies for free? The short answer throughout the book is "find another way to make money", but that's easier said than done.

Speaking from experience with friends and the like, it's obvious that sometimes people stop valuing things they get for free. A lot of people don't care about the work that goes into making a movie, or a song, or a book. Granted, a lot of people do, but what I'm getting at is, you can't just focus on the good things. Nowadays, lots of people expect others to work for free (internships, anyone?) while they themselves expect to be paid. Free isn't all that simple.

Anyway, back to the book. I expected to see bit more from the other side of the discussion, and it was repetitive, but still, a decent book on the topic.

After all the hype surrounding this series, I came to it with my expectations maybe a bit too high. Post-apocalyptic stories about zombies have been done before, so I wasn't expecting an incredibly original story, but I was hoping for some good character development and a solid storyline.

Did this book have it? Yes, though not as much as it could. The story starts a bit too suddenly and I had trouble getting into it at first. Also, I didn't connect with any of the characters. The women were mostly pitiful and weak and the men all seemed to go crazy (there were a few exceptions, mostly with secondary characters though). I hate to think that in a disaster we'd all default to that - though to be fair I can't say for sure we wouldn't, at least for some people.

As a survival story, this is pretty accurate in that most of the time is spent looking for basic needs, like food and shelter. The story is fairly interesting, and it gets better in the second chapter, but I still think it has room to get better. I'll be checking out the rest of the series, but I sincerely hope the characters grow up a little.

This book provides a decent introduction to general management, as well as touching on the most important points of more specialized topics. Even though the blurb claims that this is good for those just starting to study this subject, I found that many times - specially in financial management - explanations weren't very clear, and would require some background to be fully understood. Also, I didn't appreciate the sarcastic comments about state companies. Despite the obvious problems they might have, they're not all bad, and not everyone who works in them is a brainless old drone (they don't exactly say this, this was just the general tone whenever the state was mentioned).

Still, it has a lot of useful information, and I learned quite a bit from it.

Like a lot of people in the world today, I've been struggling for a while to truly understand just how things got to be the way they are right now. Even with everyone and their uncle talking about the crisis, most of what is said concentrates on throwing accusations to one another, and I've missed seeing a systematic, organized account of what went on. I admit, I'm not the most economically savvy person - my education has been focused primarily in the natural sciences and art. But I like to have basic knowledge of pretty much everything (not the healthiest of habits, I know) and not understanding the economic principles behind the crisis upset me, which is why I read this.

This book might just be the most important book I've read this year, so far. It's a great introduction for those who, like me, don't necessarily understand derivatives, credit default swaps, securitization, or how bail outs work. Beware though, this is not for the faint of heart - it's not easy to wrap your head around the sheer craziness of the financial systems, and the unfairness of it all is even harder to accept.

My country is now in the middle of this whole economic shenanigan. A lot of the things in this book, being mostly US and UK-centric, don't apply to us, and our situation can't be explained only by the financial system (our political systems played a big part too), but it's not hard to see that most of what went on globally is a direct consequence of the financial system's irresponsibility. It’s not hard to see that, after the housing and personal credit bubbles burst and financial institutions no longer had that source of high-risk, high-interest rates income, they had to find something else to milk for money. That something, it turns out, is entire countries. And the infamous rating agencies, the central banks, the IMF, they're all part of a broken system that results solely in putting money in the hands of the people who need it the least.

I only wish that more people would read things like this to truly understand what went on. After all, a big part of the problem is that most people had no idea of what was going in. Instead, I suspect most people just won’t find the attention span needed, and will just keep on looking for someone else to blame, not to mention keep on being more concerned with money than with value. That’s human nature for you. As it says on the book:

Public rage is like lightning, and tends to discharge its energies at anyone who has the bad luck to be prominent in the wrong way at the wrong time. As for where the anger would go if it were properly directed, that’s easy to answer: at the banks, and at the governments which let the banks do what they did.

Highly recommended for everyone.

Sometimes, in life, a book comes along that speaks to you so clearly about the things you believe that it seems to have been written by someone inside your head. For me, "Daytripper" was one of those books. Each chapter follows a day in the life of Brás, a brazilian writer, and ends with his death (this isn't a spoiler, by the way - it's right on the back cover).

But that's not what the book is about. What's important is the notion you get that life is made of the little moments we hardly think about when we're experiencing them. That death, no matter if you think about it or not, is always there, just another part of life. That home isn't a place but a complex mix of people, emotions and memories. That nothing is ever as simple as it looks.

As for the artwork, it's simply gorgeous. The drawings are the best I've seen from the artists (having seen their work in other books) and the coloring is genius. Some of the panels are so breathtaking that I spent some time just getting lost in them. It's that good.

Coincidentally, just one week ago I presented a university project about death that touched upon many of the ideas that I found inside this book, and maybe that's why it touched me in a way that may not be transmittable to other people. Still, I recommend this to everyone. Surely one of the best graphic novels I've read.

I got this book as a birthday gift from two dear friends of mine. We share many interests, and the workings of the human mind is one of them, so they figured this book would be a good match for me.

It's a good premise. The author spent a few years working as a health care assistant in a psychiatric hospital and draws on his experiences to tell short stories about mental illnesses. Unfortunately, I didn't like it as much I thought I would. I was hoping for an insightful look into this fascinating, often misunderstood world, but I felt that all the stories were superficial, with the exception of the author's own tale (the last story in the book). Many of the "stories" didn't even feel like stories at all, more like a textbook description with pictures accompanying it. I couldn't understand the constant mention of how people need to be more open-minded and tolerant towards mental illness. What's the point of saying that to a reader who is interested enough to try this book?

I can definitely see a heavy influence from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, both in graphic qualities and narrative, but this book lacks the profoundity and poignance that "Persepolis" has. Moreover, sometimes I felt like the drawings didn't even need to be there at all.

However, there were some positive points. The author's story was powerfully told (made me wish that the rest of the book was like that) and some of the personal stories of the patients he mentions are genuinely strange and interesting.

This is an ok book, and it's fairly interesting, but I do wish it dared to go deeper.

An encyclopedia left behind by Humanity to the aliens of the future, who will eventually visit our planet after the pending extinction of humankind. It attempts to explain to an outsider the intricate aspects of human life, and while doing so, it exposes the madness of it all.

After reading America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, I knew better than to expect a hilarious book from the writers of the Daily Show. In fact, while undoubtedly funny at times, the tone is mostly sarcastic, and I found this book to be utterly depressing. Humanity is so incredible, and at the same time so incredibly ridiculous.

It's by no means complete, literary or comprehensive, nor was it meant to be. Recommended as an easy to read, difficult to swallow account of the human madness.

Snow White is sent to Arabia as Fabletown's ambassador, tasked with forging an alliance between the two peoples against the conquering Adversary. Instead, the misogynist sultan takes her prisoner and intends to give her the same fate as he's given nearly every other young woman in his land: marry her in the evening, and kill her the following morning. Snow White attempts to escape that fate by doing exactly what you would expect (if you know your fairytales): entertain him with a new story about the Fables every night.

As a stand-alone book about the Fables world, this can be read even by someone with no previous knowledge of the series; however, I would recommended reading at least some of the main stories first, to start feeling interested and invested in all the characters before you read their life stories. As it stands, I was delighted to read about some of my favourite characters: Snow White, Reynard the Fox, Bigby Wolf, and Prince Ambrose, among others. Most of the stories revolve around the theme of revenge, and they're all pretty dark - darker than most of the issues on the main story, at least those I've read so far. Still, they are really interesting and well written, and the artwork is diverse and fitting to each story, so this is a wonderful addition to your library if you like Fables.

Highly recommended.

Regardless of bad choices in business practice, Polaroid and its cameras remain one of the best things that happened to Photography. Recently, with news of the company shutting down and new enterprises taking over the responsibility to perpetuate the film manufacture, there's been a revival of interest in the polaroid medium, specially for artists and photographers.

This book is gorgeous and of wonderful quality. The essays are interesting, if a little short and superficial. There's no shortage of images, and I felt like the book would have benefited from a tighter selection, as well as less literal pairings. However, there are some true gems throughout, and this is worth it for those who take interest in Polaroids.

I'm a big fan of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, but for some reason I'd never felt curious to read any of their books until this year. I considered starting with Earth (the book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, but thought I'd go through this older one first.I have to admit, when I started I was a bit taken aback. I don't know what I expected, but the first chapter ("Democracy before America") was written with such an unapologetic disregard for History that I couldn't even find it funny, at first. However, once the initial "shock" had passed, this book got funny as hell. It's opinionated, scandalous, hilarious, and so spot-on that my bittersweet feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or get depressed was sustained throughout the whole book.

This is presented in the form of an educational book for children, and since the content couldn't be further away from that demographic, it's doubly funny to see "helpful" diagrams, maps, games and illustration to help the reader understand a little better this wonderful but deeply flawed thing we call Democracy.

Highly recommended. Read with an open mind!