Exhausted anarchist and school abolitionist who can be found at nerdteacher.com where I muse about school and education-related things, and all my links are here. My non-book posts are mostly at @whatanerd@treehouse.systems, occasionally I hide on @whatanerd@eldritch.cafe, or you can email me at n@nerdteacher.com. [they/them]
I was a secondary literature and humanities teacher who has swapped to being a tutor, so it's best to expect a ridiculously huge range of books.
And yes, I do spend a lot of time making sure book entries are as complete as I can make them. Please send help.
The more I read this book, the more it feels like:
An author's self-insert story, though even the cover and back cover art don't help that (the man on the cover is Gary Wolf; the picture on the back is him sitting in a car with Jessica Rabbit);
A questionable allegory for segregation, using Toons as stand-ins for Black people;
A book that, like, is okay with talking shit about people from rural and poor communities, even though the detective is poor.
... I still think the movie took a lot of the positives and did them justice.
This book is so bizarrely different from the movie it inspired. The things, thus far, that really remain the same are the concept, genre, a handful of characters, and setting. There's also a few things that were kept, though they were changed drastically, including something about Toons and alcohol. I think there's also a line from Eddie Valiant that was kept, too.
Otherwise, entirely different. I'm not super enjoying it? But it's okay. Have no idea how they made such a good movie out of what is, thus far, a mediocre book.
Dawkins needs editors that tell him no and scribble all over his TERFy face with the reddest pen possible. God, he's a horrible writer and sucks at metaphor.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha …
Enjoyable.
4 stars
This is probably one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, and it's largely because of the structure. I absolutely adore the style of this one, especially because it was rarely a common form for the genre even though it is definitely something that I would've thought was done far more than it ever has been.
All of that sounds vague, and that's because to explain it would be to spoil the story itself.
It is definitely slow-moving at the beginning, but once it picks up? It keeps going and builds a lot of good suspense. It forces you to ask a lot of questions and to figure out which questions aren't being asked or even considered. What's not being said, even though it's being hinted at? Honestly, I adore it.
(The one thing I'd love to do, since I skimmed them, is remove the introductory texts that were inserted in …
This is probably one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, and it's largely because of the structure. I absolutely adore the style of this one, especially because it was rarely a common form for the genre even though it is definitely something that I would've thought was done far more than it ever has been.
All of that sounds vague, and that's because to explain it would be to spoil the story itself.
It is definitely slow-moving at the beginning, but once it picks up? It keeps going and builds a lot of good suspense. It forces you to ask a lot of questions and to figure out which questions aren't being asked or even considered. What's not being said, even though it's being hinted at? Honestly, I adore it.
(The one thing I'd love to do, since I skimmed them, is remove the introductory texts that were inserted in republication of the novel. All of them. They're just... a waste of paper, especially as they try to make things more important than they really are rather than just allowing people to enjoy what's there. That kind of thing always annoys me.)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha …
I started reading this because it was the final book mentioned at the end of the last book I finished (The Honjin Murders), and I had it on my bookshelf.
I'm already a little bored and thinking Honjin figured out how to do this plot better.
In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the …
Refreshing in Unexpected Ways
4 stars
Content warning
Describes but does not detail the ending.
Overwhelmingly, I really like this book because of the way it's structured. It's written in the way of a crime writer reporting on a crime that he's heard, using notes and inferences from the various storytellers and people who were present. It's quite interesting because of that, and it feels very different from other detective novels. It's also something I like about Yokomizo's work with his detective, Kindaichi Kosuke; while he is the central figure as the detective, sometimes he's not even the protagonist of the story. You still follow him through everything, but the perspective is placed less on him and more on others around him.
I do have to mention the ending. It is something that people can perceive as being inherently misogynistic (the reasoning by the murderer is but the presentation does not feel that way to me). The blame for the misogyny is still largely placed upon the murderer and other accomplices within the story. It is not described as being "correct," and it's kind of surprising considering when the book was written (which was originally in 1946).
Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …
This feels like a rare find.
4 stars
Finding books about the history of schooling is difficult, especially because many of them seem to take the position of the school as an inherent good that is necessary for society to continue. It is because this book challenges that idea that I find it so intriguing, especially as it has provided me with a range of directions to explore (both in terms of things I already knew and things I hadn't really thought about).
It is definitely something that I'd recommend people genuinely engage with, especially if the readers are willing to question beliefs (their own or society's) about the necessity of schooling, the conflation between schooling and education, the importance of literacy (and the moralising society has around illiteracy), and how the more radical elements of the left essentially dropped schooling and ignored its importance in favour of "acquiring the state."
I read this with one of my students, and both of us found it a bit boring. That's about all I can say for the book. Neither of us really enjoyed it. It was just... something we had to read.
But finding the following sentence in its marketing descriptions has made me find it more obnoxious:
At a time when childhood obesity rates are soaring and money is tight for many families, here is a book that invites readers to join in the fun of active play with games that cost nothing.
I would not support books that use fatphobia to try to sell themselves, so download (and print) it if you want to read it. The author or illustrator (or both) should also be working against this, as "outdoor play" is not a solution to childhood obesity... But a whole range of other things that are not individual solutions …
I read this with one of my students, and both of us found it a bit boring. That's about all I can say for the book. Neither of us really enjoyed it. It was just... something we had to read.
But finding the following sentence in its marketing descriptions has made me find it more obnoxious:
At a time when childhood obesity rates are soaring and money is tight for many families, here is a book that invites readers to join in the fun of active play with games that cost nothing.
I would not support books that use fatphobia to try to sell themselves, so download (and print) it if you want to read it. The author or illustrator (or both) should also be working against this, as "outdoor play" is not a solution to childhood obesity... But a whole range of other things that are not individual solutions are (better quality food, less sugar in our foods, dismantling modern agribusiness, etc).
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train …
Christie had better works.
3 stars
This book is probably one of her most well-known novels with a dozen or so adaptations, and I personally find it to be the most bland (in terms of writing) but most interesting (in terms of its adaptations).
In terms of writing a mystery, I find many of the clues too subtle to even be recognisable. Some of that is due to the audience she was clearly writing for, with Americanisms being far less common in daily speech (such as the clue of an English person who uses the phrasing of 'long distance' rather than 'trunk call', which wouldn't really even seem like a clue to many people today). Some of it is due to things that, probably as a person from the United States reading this book, I find to be more perplexing than useful as clues because they also felt wrong for us (like an American actress playing …
This book is probably one of her most well-known novels with a dozen or so adaptations, and I personally find it to be the most bland (in terms of writing) but most interesting (in terms of its adaptations).
In terms of writing a mystery, I find many of the clues too subtle to even be recognisable. Some of that is due to the audience she was clearly writing for, with Americanisms being far less common in daily speech (such as the clue of an English person who uses the phrasing of 'long distance' rather than 'trunk call', which wouldn't really even seem like a clue to many people today). Some of it is due to things that, probably as a person from the United States reading this book, I find to be more perplexing than useful as clues because they also felt wrong for us (like an American actress playing up an accent and Christie choosing to write this dialogue as 'kinder' [kinda], vurry, and Parrus... which all feel wrong, but are probably recognisable to a British audience who says 'er' as 'ah').
Other clues are sentences that would be more noticeable as stage directions, and I think this is why more people really engage with this story through a visual medium. The glances between characters that you're supposed to take note of are easier to recognise in the way cameras can follow a character's glance. It truly is a story that, I think, is boring to read on the page but is more engaging on-screen (even if, for some reason, one adaptation has Poirot losing his cool over everyone lying to him, which feels super out of character).
I also think this kind of story would be better if removed from the aristocracy. The aristocracy often receives what they feel is justice, and it's incredibly rare that they don't. It's also absurd to think that every single person in a household (particularly those often labeled as 'the help') would fawn over the same small child. It feels incredibly unrealistic and is clearly a story that comes from someone who... would see the world in that manner.
I think it'd be a better kind of story in the hands of, for example, victims of abuses that almost never receive any consequences. Maybe if someone like Brock Turner were the Ratchett/Cassetti character, it'd actually be very good.
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train …
I know this is an old book, but it's annoying that publishers don't read for editing because they're cheap bastards. There are so many times where a character has wrongly addressed someone (e.g., Hubbard, after referring to Poirot as 'Mr Poirot' a dozen times, suddenly calls him 'M Poirot' ... which is the shortening for the French) or people who've used Anglicised names (a French conductor whose name is something Michel being called Michael by his French manager).
This entire book suffers from one of the things I hate the most about detective fiction: cops. It's not that the protagonist works with the cops because the protagonist is a cop. He's the Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police, and he works within the Communist Party of China.
Despite that, the story was initially interesting. The confused exploration around Chairman Mao (as the book was "for those who had been harmed by Mao") was also interesting as an idea... Especially as there are two separate but intertwined mysteries that are presented: one related to Chairman Mao and one related to Jiao, who is the fictional granddaughter of a fictional actress who was one of Mao's mistresses. She supposedly, according to a minister in Beijing, has "Mao material" that has enabled her to improve her life from that of a humble secretary to a rich young woman. I liked this …
This entire book suffers from one of the things I hate the most about detective fiction: cops. It's not that the protagonist works with the cops because the protagonist is a cop. He's the Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police, and he works within the Communist Party of China.
Despite that, the story was initially interesting. The confused exploration around Chairman Mao (as the book was "for those who had been harmed by Mao") was also interesting as an idea... Especially as there are two separate but intertwined mysteries that are presented: one related to Chairman Mao and one related to Jiao, who is the fictional granddaughter of a fictional actress who was one of Mao's mistresses. She supposedly, according to a minister in Beijing, has "Mao material" that has enabled her to improve her life from that of a humble secretary to a rich young woman. I liked this premise because it did initially highlight the paranoia of having to maintain the image of someone like Mao (something that has been done), and it really could've been an engaging story to explore both the harms of Mao (something this book claimed it would do) and the mystery around Jiao.
However, the author basically throws away in the final two chapters when he grabs for an absurd ableist trope (multiple personality disorder) along with a terrible explanation that does incredibly little to settle anything with regards to either the mystery about Jiao (which also includes two subsequent murders) and does absolutely nothing to settle the exploration around Mao. The cop acts as a cop would (including doing nothing while a woman is being murdered except hide in the closet), and he does nothing to even really consider his place in the system that he's been quasi-questioning throughout the exploration.
On top of the terrible editing (and it is among one of the worst books I've read), it's a work that is so engaging only to slap the audience in the face with the most stereotypical of "twists" and a failure to do whatever it claimed it set out to do.
This entire book suffers from one of the things I hate the most about detective fiction: cops. It's not that the protagonist works with the cops because the protagonist is a cop. He's the Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police, and he works within the Communist Party of China.
Despite that, the story was initially interesting. The confused exploration around Chairman Mao (as the book was "for those who had been harmed by Mao") was also interesting as an idea... Especially as there are two separate but intertwined mysteries that are presented: one related to Chairman Mao and one related to Jiao, who is the fictional granddaughter of a fictional actress who was one of Mao's mistresses. She supposedly, according to a minister in Beijing, has "Mao material" that has enabled her to improve her life from that of a humble secretary to a rich young woman. I liked this …
This entire book suffers from one of the things I hate the most about detective fiction: cops. It's not that the protagonist works with the cops because the protagonist is a cop. He's the Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police, and he works within the Communist Party of China.
Despite that, the story was initially interesting. The confused exploration around Chairman Mao (as the book was "for those who had been harmed by Mao") was also interesting as an idea... Especially as there are two separate but intertwined mysteries that are presented: one related to Chairman Mao and one related to Jiao, who is the fictional granddaughter of a fictional actress who was one of Mao's mistresses. She supposedly, according to a minister in Beijing, has "Mao material" that has enabled her to improve her life from that of a humble secretary to a rich young woman. I liked this premise because it did initially highlight the paranoia of having to maintain the image of someone like Mao (something that has been done), and it really could've been an engaging story to explore both the harms of Mao (something this book claimed it would do) and the mystery around Jiao.
However, the author basically throws away in the final two chapters when he grabs for an absurd ableist trope (multiple personality disorder) along with a terrible explanation that does incredibly little to settle anything with regards to either the mystery about Jiao (which also includes two subsequent murders) and does absolutely nothing to settle the exploration around Mao. The cop acts as a cop would (including doing nothing while a woman is being murdered except hide in the closet), and he does nothing to even really consider his place in the system that he's been quasi-questioning throughout the exploration.
On top of the terrible editing (and it is among one of the worst books I've read), it's a work that is so engaging only to slap the audience in the face with the most stereotypical of "twists" and a failure to do whatever it claimed it set out to do.
Now if you were going to fall into a book, a book of fairy tales …
Concept is cute, but it's frustrating.
3 stars
I like the idea of a boy getting trapped in a book that he's cut up, altered, and flipped around. It's quite fun to see him have to deal with the repercussions to the story that his meddling has created, and I really like that as a story.
But I hate how hard it is to read the book, especially as a dyslexic person. There are cursive fonts that are incredibly difficult for me (and definitely hard to recognise for young language learners), sometimes words are suddenly written backwards, other scenes have them upside down (for good affect, but it gets old after the first page). It's just... so badly handled?
Like, the story is cute and something fun for kids to think about and imagine, but this book is just so unnecessarily difficult to read.
