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nerd teacher [books]

whatanerd@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 7 months ago

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.

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nerd teacher [books]'s books

Currently Reading (View all 7)

Picture Books (View all 139)

Middle Grade (View all 27)

2025 Reading Goal

28% complete! nerd teacher [books] has read 17 of 60 books.

Im Seong-sun: The Consultant (2024, Bloomsbury)

The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for... …

If Offered, I'd Reject It

This book really left me disappointed, especially with the promised concept. Perhaps it was the marketing team yet again, but this book was not as expected. It was excruciatingly dull beyond belief (amusingly so for the protagonist to be like "I'm sorry I'm not a funny killer" or something to that effect in the middle).

Whatever "satire" exists in this novel, it was so easy to skip over as to not really notice it.

commented on The Consultant by Im Seong-sun

Im Seong-sun: The Consultant (2024, Bloomsbury)

The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for... …

I have read so much about masturbation and penises that I've already forgotten what the point of the book is, and I keep trying to find it... but then ceasing to care because I keep reading about masturbation and penises, which doesn't make me like the book. Whether I finish it remains to be seen.

Akimitsu Takagi: The Noh Mask Murder (2024, Pushkin Vertigo)

This ingeniously constructed masterpiece, written by one of Japan's most celebrated crime writers and translated …

Charming and Enjoyable

I have become really enamoured with a lot of the translations of Japanese detective and mystery fiction that have been coming out as of late, and it's more because a lot of them seem to be grounded both in a passion for other novels that I've enjoyed (a common occurrence in some is mentioning at least one Western classic detective author) while also putting their own spin on it to make it wholly their own, grounding it in very specific aspects of Japan and Japanese culture (not all of it, obviously, but definitely some of it). It's this kind of playing with elements and building upon their own obvious interests in works that came before that I genuinely enjoy.

I also really like how refreshing this specific novel is. I can't comment on why without spoiling it and its structure, which I think would greatly decrease a person's experience. But …

Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011)

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily …

Surprisingly, Books Written By Grifters Are Garbage.

Steven Pinker, like many of his ilk, is nothing more than a grifter pretending to have been widely read in a specific (and too broad) topic, and this book proves that he really needed to shut up for a second and actually engage in a wider range of discussions and explorations in order to better understand "violence." He does not understand violence in any capacity, and he does not understand anything beyond a very narrow view of the world that only further benefits people like him.

My initial problem with the book is that he never outlines what he considers "violence" to be, and that should immediately position someone to ask the same handfuls of questions over and over again while they read this. He keeps saying things like "violence has decreased," but he never seems to recognise what violence is and often hems and haws over what to include. …

Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011)

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily …

SO. CLOSE. TO FINISHING.

But like, this guy literally references the "work" done by some of the most bigoted people (Charles Murray, Francis Fukuyama, Satoshi Kanazawa) and doesn't even ask questions about what they're saying. Like... Wow.

Also interesting that he can't define violence, so we're supposed to assume it's interpersonal violence only. He doesn't want to explore the violence of bureaucracy, which also leads to genocides. And it hasn't aged well considering he keeps claiming we "lived in a time of peace" when we didn't live there IN THE FIRST PLACE, and we certainly don't live there now.

Valentina Migliarini, Brent C. Elder: The Future of Inclusive Education (EBook, Palgrave Macmillan) No rating

This book addresses the tensions of existing theories and practices of inclusive education from an …

At an embryonic level, Miles and Singal (2010) have begun to question Salamanca Statement’s inability to see disability as part of the human condition and to discuss how such a groundbreaking policy failed to take account of intersectionalities and of the multi-dimensionality of discrimination operating with education systems.

The Future of Inclusive Education by , (Page 7)

I struggle with these authors' inability to look deeper than the surface level and to fail to understand how the Salamanca Statement operated. In order to recognise this, a person needs to understand that the people who wrote this were "representatives of governments" that were present at the World Conference on Special Needs Education. The first question that should be asked is this: How many of these people were disabled? How many of them had needs related to their disability that went unmet during school? How many of them would even acknowledge that they were disabled?

And the answer is very few. We can look at our current governments, not even the ones in 1994 (when the statement was drafted), and see that the representation of disabled people remains quite low. Knowing this, it should've prompted the authors to question how this "groundbreaking policy" (which it isn't; I'd argue that …

R. F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena …

Conceptually interesting, deeply discomforting in presentation

This wasn't a book that I could particularly feel okay reading; I'm fine with being made uncomfortable by topics within books, but there are rarely ways material is presented that makes me want to crawl in a hole until it stops. That is how this book felt because the constant focus on the social media landscape made me want to look away, especially when I just kept repeating to myself all the things that June should've done (as if she were a real person).

The concept is really interesting, though I find the initial premise harder to believe in the setup (maybe it's simply that I wouldn't steal a manuscript from the apartment of someone who I'd just watch choke to death on mostly cooked pancakes, as that would never be my first thought). Everything that comes after, however, is mostly believable. (Well, except for some nitpicks, like June not …

R. F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena …

I think I figured out why it is that this book keeps grating on me, and it's because the vagueness of the summary and its projected genre made me expect something entirely different. (As in, I saw "'borrowing' her identity," I was thinking it was more literal than what's portrayed.)

Also, I feel like this line from the Kirkus summary/quasi-review of it sums up another aspect that I find discomforting because I... generally try to avoid social media drama (and look into the claims myself while trying to avoid social media as much as possible): "Yes, publishing is like this; finally someone has written it out. At times, the novel feels so much like a social media feed that it’s impossible to stop reading—what new drama is waiting to unfold, and who will win out in the end?"

So while that person really finds that gripping, I find it really …

R. F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena …

At the end of the book, Athena’s original draft is unbearably sanctimonious. Here she leaves the more engaging personal narratives behind to hit the reader over the head with the myriad ways in which the laborers have been forgotten and ignored. The laborers killed in action could not be buried in plots near European soldiers. They were not eligible for military awards because they were purportedly not in combat. And—the part that Athena was angriest about—the Chinese government was still fucked over in the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of WWI, with the territory of Shandong ceded from Germany to Japan.

But who’s going to follow all of that? It’s hard to sympathize with the stakes in the absence of a main character. The last forty pages read more like a history paper than a gripping wartime narrative. They feel out of place, like a senior term paper attached haphazardly to the end. Athena did always have such a didactic streak.

Yellowface by  (Page 44)

R. F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena …

The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.

Yellowface by  (Page 42)

-wheeeeze-

R. F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena …

I like her editorial style, too. Most of her requested changes are simple clarifications. Are American audiences going to know what this phrase means? Should this flashback be placed in this early chapter when we haven’t met the character in the proper timeline yet? This dialogue exchange is artful, but how does it move the story along?

Honestly, I’m relieved. Finally someone’s calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.” She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn’t have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you’re left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I’ve read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.)

She’s done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer’s necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it’s not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are.

Yellowface by  (Page 41 - 42)