Although I don't read as much as I should (I am currently reading Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis"), some of my favourite reads have been, (I have interests in art (especially painting, skulpting and sketching), math (Math like love is a universal language! And as my late friend Dr. Migneron used to say "Math is not a spectator sport!" My favourite math skill in mathematics in grade school was when I was shown how to calculate a square root by hand by long division! Here's the method.) and my favourite math tv show was a Sunday morning "Calculus en Francais" show on the Canadian French tfo channel where a professor with 3 students would give lectures and do calculus and inifinite series problems with a white marker on a shiny black whiteboard (this show let me learn French and Calculus at the same time!), music (I love to sing and I am learning to play the guitar like my Dad. I won a Karaokie contest singing "Thank God, I'm a country boy!" in the Ah-So Gardens restaurant bar in London, Ontario! When my Dad served in the Czech army he played the guitar and sang American Songs from Radio Luxembourg for all the soldiers), physics (right now I am having fun playing with granular materials, I love to describe nature and physics with simple, elegant and beautiful equations!), chemistry (especially stoichiometry and organic chemistry, It was fun making ethers and ice cream in grade 11 chemistry, and wood distillations were fun, although I had nightmares being attacked by titration curves), english (especially poetry such as T.S. Eliot, Lord Byron, Earl Birney and many other works, and ofcourse I love Shakespeare, Sophocles and Greek mythology. I also loved the play "Twelve Angry Men". I also loved Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" which parallelled Sophocles' Oedipus Rex syndrome. Here is my first English essay at Ryerson on "Hedda Gabler: A Victim of A Decadent Society". I love imagery and writing with passion. I love Henry David Thoreau's "On Walden's Pond"), philosophy, history (especially WWII (In Mr. Sanders' history class in Northern HighSchool in Canada I did a project of how the Japanese Canadians were sent to concentration camps in Canada during WWII and I also argued that the Canadian Senate is necessary as a check on government policy--The Senate is not an old folks' home! Back then there were only 252 seats in the House of Commons! And we watched videos of Prime Minister Trudeau and Rene Levesque having debates about the fate of Quebec!), and cowboy western days "Yee Hah!"), urban geography and cities, mechanical and civil/structural engineering, building science, project and construction management, people skills and communication, conflict management and negotiation tactics and I love the challenge of winning over people, and architectural history, design (especially sketching designs reaming through a large roll of tracing paper), and architectural technology, classical civilization and computer programming(especially graphical visualizations and physical simulations), and any sort of problem solving. I also love reading about bodybuilding and skulpting my body, and I love watching, reading and breathing sports. I love reading about sports stars in the "Sports Illustrated Magazine" and I love when they do an article of sports stars helping charities, visiting children's hospitals and being nice to kids!)

First I'll start with my childhood books, TV Shows and cartoons. These are famous Czech tales about insects. I also loved Czech tales about "The Adventures of Honza" and "Soldier Svejk". I loved English tales about "Peter Rabbit", "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", "The Three Little Pigs", "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Little Train That Could", "Curious George" and "Baarbar the Elephant". I loved Dr. Seuss's "The Cat in the Hat" and especially "Green Eggs and Ham". I got up at 6 am every weekday morning to watch "Mighty Mouse" say "Here I come to save the day!", Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Hour Show, Banana Splitz, Pink Panther and Speedy Gonzalez Looney Tunes, Yogie Bear and Boo Boo, Huckleberry Hound and Scooby Scooby Doo Where Are You cartoons. I also loved watching as a young boy Captain Kangaroo with the ping pong balls falling on his head, The Friendly Giant, The Polka Dot Door, The Two French Astronauts, and Sesame Street. I also loved the Muppet Show and a show teaching Calculus in French on TFO. I loved watching "The Monkees", Gilligan's Island, My Three Sons, Lassie, The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Mork & Mindy (with Robin Williams, Pam Dawson, and "The Good Humour Man" Jonathan Winters!), The 60's Batman series ("POW! BAM!), Flipper!, Japanese Godzilla movies, Knight Rider, Baywatch, Taxi, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, The Little Rascals and of course The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, You Bet Your Life! and Abbot & Costello! I loved variety shows like Captain and Tenille, Tony Orlando and Dawn and Sonny and Cher, and Hee Haw! And Weekend Horror Movies on CBS's Sir Graves Ghastly show and of course The Adams Family and The Munsters! The Beachcombers, Faulty Towers and Monty Python's Flying Circus as well! My favourite game shows were Tic Tac Dough, Let's Make A Deal, The Match Game, The Joker's Wild! and Beat the Clock! I loved Soupy Sales getting a coconut cream pie in his face! and of course To Tell The Truth and The Price is Right! Now I like Wheel of Fortune and Jeapordy!:-)

Now for something poignant: Who Has Seen the Wind, by W. O. Mitchell(Biography,Eulogy,Spotlight)

The Old Man and the Sea (lecture,questions), by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway.

Animal Farm by George Orwell.

The Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce.

The Black Leapord by Michelle TooGood. Black Leapord by Steven Voien There is a cool cobra scene in this book! "In the deceptively stable nation of Terre Diamantee, a former Belgian colony in West Africa, Dvaid Trowbridge, an American field biologist is determined to track the elusive leopard in the rain forest. As he settles into his unorthodox research regimen, three murders occur at the forest station--and Trowbridge himself is ambushed for no dicernible reason" (source: from Chapters web site's Editors' and Publishers' synopsis)

Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kippling.

I also had beautiful childrens' colourful picture books on David Livingstone and on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

I also had a large beautifully illustrated book of Children's Bible Stories. My favourite was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

I wrote my grade 11 term paper on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I thought that when you did ellipses dots with [sic]"s, that you had to have a dot for every word that you left out of your quotation, so my english term paper had a lot of dots and [sic]'s! Our english teachers at Fort McMurray Composite HighSchool (Mrs. Newman, Mr. Paul and Miss Cook (Miss Cook looked like Miss Piggy on the Muppets) were very hard on us, but they told us that we would appreciate it when we got to University and later on in life. I had to go back a grade in English and repeat grade 10 english when I moved to Alberta. I remember our highest grade in our English term paper was -8%! I remember my Northern HighSchool English teacher Mr. Milner who would mark your english test while you were writing it! It was frustrating seeing X's being put on my test while I was writing the test, but I love him because he introduced me to my first Shakespeare play "Julius Caesar"!

Dune by Frank Herbert

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Utopia by Sir Thomas More.

Gullivers Travels by Thomas Swift. (My favourite land is the land run by horses.)

Brave New World by Alduous Huxley.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Ralph The Motorcycle Mouse aka The Mouse and The Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

Animal Farm by George Orwell.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

Skeleton Crew short stories by Stephen King.

A Whack on the Side of the Head! by Roger Von Oech

In Search of Excellence! by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman

Managing from the Heart by Hyler Bracey

Design Office Management Handbook by Fred A. Stitt (Editor)

Management of Design Offices by P.A. Rutter and A.S. Martin

Graphic Thinking For Architects and Designers by Paul Laseau

Sir Bannister Fletcher's "A History of Architecture".

"A Book of Buildings"

Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins

The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz

How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The Quick & Easy Way To Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie

Be A Better Manager: Improve performance, profits and productivity by Michael Armstrong

The Intuitive Manager by Roy Rowan

Winning: the Innovation Game (How you can succeed in a fast-changing world) by Denis E. Waitley and Robert B. Tucker

Future Shock and The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler

The Study of Man by Eva Taube

Man and his world by Malcolm Ross and John Stevens

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

Civilisation by Kenneth C. Clarke

Kings of Infinite Space by Frank Lloyd Wright & Michael Graves

I have a great book on Frank Lloyd Wright who believed that "Form follows function". I love his "Falling Water" design which is a home built on top of a waterfall with the waterfall running through its living room!

From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe.

Designing Places for People by C.M. Deasy.

AIA Architectural Graphics Standards by Charles George Ramsey and John Ray Jr. Hoke.

Building Construction Illustrated by Francis D.K. Ching and Cassandra Adams.

I also have a book called "Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking" by Diane F. Halpren and another one called "Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky".

There's a nice "The Family Circus" cartoon in Diane F. Halpren's book "Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking" that says "Thinking is when the picture is in your head with the sound turned off!" I truly believe in graphical thinking.

Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Psychological Issues by Joseph Rubinstein and Brent D. Slife. You should thoroughly research BOTH SIDES of an argument and only then you can make an informed decision.

Science and Religion: Are They Compatible by Paul Kurtz, Barry Karr, and Ranjit Sadhu

Think Like a Manager: Everything They Didn't tell You When They Promoted You by Roger Fritz.

Religion, Science and Philosophy (edited by Bertrand Russell)

I learned from one of my philosophy electives (PHILOSOPHY 709) at Ryerson from Professor Jamie Crooks (I took Englishes and Philosophies as liberal arts electives at Ryerson) that Science and Religion are both forms of knowledge. Religion and Science ARE compatible. Science is knowledge of the self, while religion is knowledge of the other.

In Jamie Crooks' second course PHILOSOPHY 809a, I also enjoyed studying works by Hegel (I love Hegel), Neitzche (my favourite line is "God is Dead, We have killed him"), Descartes (my favourite line is "I think, therefore I am"), and Kierkegard, and Martin Heidegger's "A Question Concerning Technology".

The Struggle for Democracy by Edward S. Greenberg and Bejamin I. Page.

So You Want to be Prime Minister by Ben Wicks. All I want is a toilet seat in the House of Commons and write the constitution on a roll of toilet paper! :-) I love the Canadian flag. If you look at the Maple Leaf in our flag closely you'll see on the left and right, two faces with long noses and the heads butted against one another. One face is the Tories (Conservatives) and the other face is the Grits (Liberals). I guess they have long noses because they are politicians lying like Pinnochio! Just kidding! :-) On a more serious note, I know that our politicians try their best. They have a very hard job, especially the Prime Minister and leaders of the opposition parties. There's an old saying: There are many routes to succcess but the sure route to failure is trying to please everyone. Some of the unpopular decisions to make are the ones that are best for the country. A political leader has to have a vision for the country.

Straight From The Heart by right honourable Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

I love the book and movie based on the book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". In this tale, a young doctor named Tomas has many beautiful women that he makes love with erotically. All that love-making practise makes Tomas a great lover. I believe a boyfriend should be a great lover for his girlfriend to give her pleasure in his physical expression of love to her. But at the end Tomas finds his one true innocent love. This takes place during the Prague Spring of 1968 when the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia. I was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and my Dad, Mom, older sister and I escaped Communism when we went for a vacation to Yugoslavia when the borders were opened temporarily during this period. See my biography web page for more information about my escape.