Reviews and Comments

The concept of this book is at least interesting (a boy whose birthday it is 'hijacks' a story about a birthday bunny, changing it to a story of a battle bunny), but that's about it.

In terms of legibility, this book is way too hard to follow. Because it's written with scratching out lines (and still seeing them), it makes it very distracting and hard to know where you're supposed to look. The whole book is written in the style of a kid writing on top of an already published children's story. That's kind of cool, but the messiness makes it confusing; as an adult with dyslexia, I occasionally got lost figuring out which line to focus on. I can only imagine how a child with a reading disorder (or even a new reader) might get confused. (I do like the style, but I think it needs to be revamped to be clearer.)

I'm also kind of bored by the constant narrative of "boys will imagine war." Why? Why can't boys imagine something other than fighting and dropping bombs on people? I don't really think this is a necessary stereotype to perpetuate, especially in the current climate. Granted, I also would've said the same thing when it was published in 2013. The stories for and about boys are so limiting that it feels uncomfortable, and we really should be discouraging a positive interest in war.

One of the things I've never liked about David McKee's books is that they feel routine and a bit dull? Not just because I'm reading them as an adult, but it's in comparison to other children's books. They're bright and colourful, but the story is always a bit lackluster and trite, with there being both tedious additions that go nowhere (in this book's case, another elephant who can throw his voice and play pranks) and also tedious structures for otherwise useful moral lessons.

This is usually the complaint I've had from students who've had to read it in elementary school because it was in their "reading level" or because it was assigned to them in class, and it's hard to not see why.

I'm not overly fond of this one, but perhaps it's also because I'm not completely sold on the presentation of the lesson.

This is particularly because George was "the scruffiest giant in town," and he "always wore the same pair of old brown sandals and the same old patched-up gown." When one day, he notices a new shop, he buys a whole new outfit, but he slowly gives them away to animals in need. In the end, he returns to wearing his "scruffy" clothes that have gone unchanged (unrepaired and uncleaned).

While I can appreciate this lesson (giving to others in need), and the animals do come together to thank him with a card and crown, I find it perplexing that no one worked together to help mend and clean his original clothes or help him fix his shoes; he just returns to wearing them because he cannot purchase a second new outfit after giving away parts of the first one. It's fine that he's wearing it, but I would've preferred to see a more mutual engagement between the animals George helped and George himself.

One of the things I'm always vaguely annoyed by in Julia Donaldson books are how there are occasionally mid-way rhymes (as in, the sentences have rhymes within them, even though they're set as couplets with the next line).

It is a book that often is selected among the available ones, though; this is usually because it has dragons, and I suspect kids enjoy those.

The amount of people whose careers have weaved between MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the propaganda units, BBC Monitoring, the BBC Board, and the military is...

It's fucking astounding, honestly. It's not surprising, but the fact that the BBC has managed to be so trusted (until recently) across the globe and has achieved such success as British soft power (and this is knowingly part of the strategy they employ)... Is just amazing.

There are some aspects of the book that I like more than the TV show (such as Dot's personality and how she was found by Phryne and also how much more of Mac we get and that Mac is actually a bigger part of the story).

I like both, but I can definitely see some strengths here that went amiss in the show (but I can also see some of the strengths the show has over the book, too).

I am going to preface this with a few things: I'm not a fan of the weird pro-police and pro-justice sentiment toward the end (particularly with the inclusion of a dirty cop as one of the antagonists); I feel like the stance on drugs is a bit archaic and fails to really reckon with something one of the characters mentions (recreation vs. addiction, among other aspects like how some people will prey on the poor); and I sort of have this mixed feeling on the presentation of the teenagers in the story (for the record, I know it's not super uncommon for teenagers to live alone and near their schools, especially for those who are older and have to travel long distances; it's more just... their behaviour in this situation because it felt like they didn't need to be teenagers).

That said, I don't think it's bad. I think there are areas where it spends a lot of time conflicting with itself; in some cases, that works (the framing of "Lumikki never asks for help" actually works well in this manner), but there are others where it feels like the contradictions are the result of an external worldview that definitely doesn't gel with mine and is one that I commonly find myself questioning.

As for the resolution of the story, I feel like it also contradicts with itself. There is this feeling of quasi-relief, where some people are "where they belong" while others aren't. And it's just peculiar. But that contradiction is probably what enables this to be a series.

It's been a while since I really found a book that I just gelled with. Like, really gelled with because of its sense of humour (when it's called for), structure, style, and characters. It's also a bit more distant from the police (though they still exist), including some actual critique of the police and how connections corrupt. It's still pretty minimal, but it's so much nicer in that regard than a lot of other mystery/detective fiction where they highlight how police do so little and then are promptly running to the cops to fix things, while this is more of a tenuous situation of people both using the tools they have (individual cops) and recognising that the whole thing sucks.

Again, it's not full-on anti-police, but it at least recognises aspects that other detective fiction often glosses over... And I appreciate that.

It also indicated that there'd be a romance within it, and I was very... whew. I was hopeful at the beginning that that wouldn't be the focus or shift into the focus, and it doesn't. It's very cute and sweet, but it's not displacing the mystery. I was afraid it would, but I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't.

There are two things that I'm not liking about this book.

First, I hate how many clauses within clauses Said uses. It makes it really hard to follow a sentence and understand what it's trying to say, which is already difficult as a dyslexic reader. For him being the "accessible" option to learning about Orientalism, it makes me wonder how inaccessible other works are seen to be. Even upon re-reading sentences, I often find myself lost in trying to figure out what is even meant by it. This is more than likely a me-thing, but it's just frustrating (and this is coming from someone who often gets accused of not being straightforward enough in English and using clauses within clauses).

Second, there is a ridiculous amount of untranslated text. For a book written in English, I never thought I'd need to be proficient in either German (which I'm okay with) and French (which I'm not okay with). Especially the latter. With few exceptions, there are whole chunks of untranslated references, which decreases clarity of the examples given.

I am not opposed to doing the work to understand something on its own terms, but I do find myself getting gradually annoyed because I can't figure out how to read sentences to make them comprehensible (either because of punctuation choices or because of language decisions).

If anything, and perhaps this is what enables me to be more forgiving of these two frustrating things, the exhaustion of trying to read about Orientalism is only a glimmer of the exhaustion of living the realities of Orientalism.

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.

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.

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 it definitely hits a lot of those 'classic' notes of what makes a mystery story feel good and feel grounded in a person's moral world while also still making it engaging to try to solve it as you're reading the text.

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. Sometimes it's a focus on interpersonal violence, sometimes it's focusing on serial killers and mass murderers, and occasionally he's discussing wars and genocides. And a lot of the stats around these things are just... flippantly tossed out there. At no point does he consider the constant bureaucratic and state-sanctioned violence that many people endure on the daily (either directly or indirectly) to be a problem or even violence at all, and the killers he discusses almost never seem to be world leaders (except for those who have been socially granted the status of 'murderer', like Hitler).

Oh, would now also be a good time to point to the fact that a large basis for this book is literally a coffee table book, constant references in the Bible, and a man who self-describes as an "atrocitologist" and "keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history's major wars, massacres, and genocides... that are specifically enumerated in the Bible." Would it also be a good time to mention that he repeatedly conflates fiction for reality, citing movies and novels as examples violence? It should be.

This man is a quack, and he refuses to actually engage in looking at any of the societal issues around violence (except the societal issues that might see him killed, it feels), and he repeatedly cites "researchers" who should be met with huge degrees of skepticism. In one chapter, her references Francis Fukuyama and Charles Murray at the same time. In another, while talking about the Flynn Effect, he almost entirely ignores most of James Flynn's actual work and own personal statements (most of which was done well before 2011) in favour of Charles Murray's interpretations. He then later uses work done by Satoshi Kanazawa to make his point. All of these men have had major problems with varying forms of bigotry (most notably and obviously racism), and yet that's who Steven chooses to cite without even a glimmer of a criticism.

He also completely misrepresents studies done by people who actually seem to know what they're talking about to make them align with his views, which is a common thing among white men in academia (and academia in general, but that's definitely as a result as its history with particular hierarchical structures that have impacted it and been regarded as "neutral" and "impartial"). Even when he uses things that are statistically sound, he uses it to further his own goals rather than to explore what those statistics even mean in their context. He has a preconceived idea of the world and no curiosity to explore beyond it, something you'd think a "curious" person would do (but he wrote this to "correct" everyone's view that the world is more violent today [in 2011], so it's not like curiosity was the point).

I don't want to write more about how horrible this book is, so I'll end it with this incredibly bizarre and ludicrous (even by the standards of 2011) fictional commencement speech that could've been given in 1976 about what 2011 and beyond would look like (because he "[had] no memory of the [one] that sent [him] into the world of adulthood," which gave him license to invent one whole cloth). He wrote it with some interesting "predictions" about the future, let's look at some of them:

• "The peace in Western Europe will continue indefinitely, and within five years the incessant warring in East Asia will give way to a long peace there as well."
• "Fascism too will vanish from Europe, then from much of the rest of the world."
• "The Middle East also has surprises in store. You have just lived through the fifth war between Israel and Arab states in twenty-five years. These wars have killed fifty thousand people and recently threatened to drag the superpowers into a nuclear confrontation. But within three years the president of Egypt will hug the prime minister of Israel in the Knesset, and they will sign a peace treaty that will last into the indefinite future. Jordan too will make a lasting peace with Israel. Syria will engage in sporadic peace talks with Israel, and the two countries will not go to war."

All of which have certainly aged like fine milk. This book is garbage, and its best use is as kindling.

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.