Review: Two Like Me and You by Chad Gibbs

Rating: 3/5
Source: ARC from Netgalley for review
Date finished: 16 June
Pages: 298
Publication date: May 20 2019

Summary: 
A teenage boy breaks an old man with dementia out of his nursing home and smuggles him to France in search of the man's long-lost liver, and in hopes of getting famous to convince his famous girlfriend to get back with him.

Negatives: 

I found this book difficult to get into - it was one of those books where I read a few pages, then put it down for weeks, then once I picked it up again when I'd nothing to do in a bus read the rest in two days. 

The narrator is a perv - are teenage boys just like that? He keeps talking about ogling random girls, and his goal is fairly creepy in general. He was also very reactive, which honestly was fine as a reader but I hear you're not supposed to do that. 

Finally, I didn't find the ending satisfying. There was something in there that I'm pretty sure was supposed to be some grand metaphor but I'm afraid I did not get it. 

Positives:

Once I got into the story, it was a fun adventure, a romp through France with lots of nice little details. It was also solidly funny, and the relationships in it were pretty heart-warming and wholesome, especially the protagonist's relationship with his best friend - a heartfelt male friendship! Amazing! 

While Parker (the girl who drags him into this adventure) was kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she had her own problems and her own goals in life, which I liked. 

In summary: If you can stick with it through the first few pages, a fun and pretty wholesome story.  It wasn't one of those books that stick with me or make me strongly identify with the characters or feel very deep, but it was an enjoyable read.

Book Reviews: May 18 - June 13

I've read 8 books between May 18 and today, and like last time with the books from May 1 to May 17 I've decided to do bulk reviews because that'd be a lot of individual reviews to write!

Le Petit Nicolas - Goscinny & Sempe

Rating: 3/5
Source: Bought for Kindle app on iPad
Date finished: May 18
Pages: 167

This is the first French book I've ever read. It's a children's book and is, I am surprised to find out, only 167 pages long. It took me weeks to read because I read one chapter (about 5%) a day. But hey, it's in a different language. So that's pretty good. And the stories were grand.



Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World - Clive Thompson

Rating: 3/5
Source: Local library app
Date finished: May 23
Pages: 448

An interesting anthropological history of the emergence of tech culture. Quite a few interesting insights (e.g. about women in tech, AI) I may write more about later. I knocked off a star because he said he was surprised to find out someone had Asperger's because he had liked them!




You Can Change the World! Everyday Teen Heroes Making a Difference Everywhere - Margaret Rooke

Rating: 2/5
Source: ARC from Netgalley for review
Date finished: late May?
Pages: 240

A variety of stories written by teenagers around the world about inspiring things they've done. Felt it was false advertising as it was really about things like overcoming adversity, being yourself etc more than changing the world. It was also pretty rude about non-teenagers and formatted terribly, even for an ARC. Full review here (I reviewed this one in full because I got it for review). 



Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

Rating: 4/5
Source: Local library app
Date finished: June 3
Pages: 128

A beautiful little story about a 5th-grade friendship with a devastating ending. I found it hard to get into at first because of the narrator's dialect, but it's really quite gorgeous.




Internal Medicine - Terrence Holt

Rating: 2/5
Source: Brown University bookshop
Date finished: June 4
Pages: 288

A collection of essays about life as a hospital doctor. I love these stories, except this was ruined because he says at the start that none of the stories are real - not even the narrator is really him. I understand changing patient names, and while it ruins it a bit if you change details of their diseases, fine - but he said he fully amalgamated patients so as not to profit off anyone's suffering. Noble ideal, but why write it in that case? There was also a completely fictional story at the end with some moral I couldn't understand. 

On the bright side, it was compelling and I read it from the evening of June 3 into the evening of June 4. And it was pretty cheap, around $6. First physical book I've read in a while. That day I also bought Planet Earth is Blue even though it was physical and ridiculously expensive because I wanted to support the autistic author.

The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

Rating: 5/5
Source: Local library app
Date finished: June 8
Pages: 444

This book was amazing. I'll list my few gripes first:

• the AAVE dialect bothered me a bit, especially them always saying 'out the' instead of 'out of the', but I get why it was used. Just hard to get used to.
• No idea why Starr didn't get arrested for one of the things she did in the book (not that I think she should've, morally, necessarily, but it seems like something you'd be arrested for)
• I felt uncomfortable criticising the book because I'm white, which is not ideal.
• Starr seemed rich (e.g. her dad owns a shop and she goes to a private school, albeit with a scholarship) and felt somewhat estranged from her black friends since she goes to the white school - I wondered whether this was done to make her more palatable. My gripe is that she says in the book something like 'X is white, I'm black. X is rich, I'm poor' when she's not poor!

Now back to the good stuff. It was seriously great. It's about Starr's friend, Khalil, being shot by the police while she's in the car with him, and her subsequent choice on whether to speak out and try to get justice for him. It was so compelling and really made me empathise with her situation (and feel angry that police departments get to investigate the crimes of their own officers?! Does that happen in real life?!). But what's really impressive is that even without the topical, compelling subject, this book was a great YA and reminded me why I love YA so much. It's hard to put your finger on, exactly, but it's the way you get up close to the narrator and feel their life around you. Also, the scenes with her family were super adorable, same with her boyfriend, and her little brother's name, Sekani, is cool. 

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team - Simon Sinek, David Mead, Peter Docker

Rating: 2/5

Source: Local library app

Date finished: June 9

Pages: 256

I like the core concept, which is that finding your WHY (he always bloody capitalises it) means looking for your origin story: what are the threads that go through your life experiences and show you what motivates you to do what you do. I may try to find out, though I dislike how he keeps saying you need a partner and can't do it by yourself - maybe that's true, but maybe he's trying to sell his workshops.

Apparently the process is to think of a load of specific childhood stories and figure out why they're important to you, then draw out themes from there. 

This was one of three leadership books I just took out from the library - the Laidlaw Scholarship have got their claws into me apparently! Our Laidlaw workshops and other entrepreneurship stuff I've done have talked a lot about the importance of vision but I've struggled a lot with articulating mine, so I read this book. I'm glad I picked this one instead of the first book, START WITH WHY, because I would've been frustrated without practical instructions I think. I know I struggle with leadership - maybe it's because I'm autistic but I really find it very difficult. I am a leader in the sense I take the initiative to do new things, but I'm not good at working with teams and I want to be, both as an ordinary member of the team and as the leader of a group. One issue is that I do not naturally hold much authority or gravitas, so I got a book about leadership when not in a position of authority and another one about communication.

Now for my many gripes: 

• He gives the template of a WHY statement as 'to ________________ so that _________', with the first blank being your contribution and the second its impact. All okay so far. But he gives many examples of supposedly good WHY statements throughout the book and nearly all of them are utterly shite! 
• To innovate relentlessly in order to create opportunities for everyone*
• To believe in people so that they can, in turn, believe in themselves
• To provoke people to think differently so that they can be awakened to new possibilities (I guess this one is ok)
• To bring people together to savor life (the company makes coffee machines)
• To enable people to be extraordinary so that they can do extraordinary things
• To propel people forward so that they can make their mark on the world
• To provide for people so that they thrive and feel empowered to always do the right thing

The only good one I remember was about a guy wanting to promote sustainability to leave the Earth a better place for future generations. 

• He says everyone has a WHY, and that the WHY must include helping people - this just seems unlikely. There have to be some people in the world who are not in fact driven by helping others. 
• He says everyone has one WHY, and that the reason your colleagues, friends and significant other love you are all the same, which I doubt. He also says that the contribution you make to your family is the same as the contribution you make in other areas of your life, which is obviously false. Maybe this is why so many of the WHYs above are so vague. Or maybe it's that their jobs are to do this WHY training so it's very meta. 
• Misuse of biology - reading this kind of book (what is it? It's not even pop science - pop psychology?) does put a biologist in danger of annoyance, but ugh. 
• One of the tips is to think of a day where you left work and thought 'I'd do that for free' and figure out what it was about that day that made you think that. But I mean, I think that about most days at work (I would still like to be paid, thanks) and I don't think it's necessarily connected to some deep inner purpose. I do find biology fulfilling but I don't see what that has to do with helping others (it's not for medicine), and one major reason I say I'd do that for free is that I spend most of my day coding and doing data analysis and I do exactly that at home as a hobby. The money helps me stick with it through the tedious and tough moments. And also I need to eat and otherwise service my corporeal form.

Planet Earth is Blue - Nicole Panteleakos

Rating: 3/5
Source: Bought from Brown University bookstore
Date finished: June 11
Pages: 240

I bought this book even though it was non-digital and very expensive because I wanted to support the #actuallyautistic author writing about an autistic person. I'm not sure how I feel about the book. The narrator had a very, VERY childish voice even though she's about twelve, which I didn't really enjoy. I liked it talking about the people who did and didn't believe in her because she couldn't speak, and it was accurate to the parts of the autistic experience myself and the character share. 

Review: You Can Change the World by Margaret Rooke

Rating: 2/5
Source: ARC from Netgalley for review
Pages: 240


Summary

A collection of vignettes, each a few pages long, from about 50 teenagers to inspire fellow teenagers to take action in the world, get through adverse experiences or turn their lives around. 

The Good

There was a variety of stories, and some of them were indeed inspiring, like the girl who got Tesco to agree to stop selling eggs from caged hens or the guy into fashion design who makes clothes for the homeless. 

It wasn't just famous people. There were a lot of people I know or know of from the teen activism/science fair circuit but there was only one of them here. Whether that was because the author couldn't get a piece from them or chose not to talk to them, I don't know. It would've been interesting to hear from, for example, Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin. However, it was good to give these lesser-known activists some publicity. And the fact that these teens seem relatively normal, not at the exalted heights of Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, might make it easier for reading teenagers to relate and feel inspired.

I noticed there were loads of autistic people included, which makes me wonder whether we're drawn to activism or whether the author is drawn to us! 

The Bad

My main issue is that this book was false advertising. It's called 'YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD' but only a small section of it is about campaigns to address issues in the world, while the rest are to do with things like coping with a parent's death or bullying. Those are good things and deserve recognition, and perhaps the author means to express the idea that change on a small scale changes the world too, but that did not get across. 

Something that really annoyed me was the insults towards non-teenagers. So many of the contributors to the book said teens are more flexible, creative, etc than non-teenagers. It really annoyed me because the way it was written made me feel ancient when I'm only twenty! I'm one year done with being a teen but they made it sound like I'm basically dead! That said, it did have some fair points like that teens have a unique ability to make change through social media and in school because of the way teens socialise, and that teens are impulsive and more likely to take risks, which is often bad but can be necessary to make changes.

Then there's a general issue with any sort of book like this, which is: how do they decide what's 'good'? Presumably they want to encourage teens to change the world for the good, but that's a very ill-defined concept. For example, I think all the teens here used non-violent (and not even mildly disruptive of business at all) means, but I think violently liberating a concentration camp would be considered good. And if a cause is mainstream enough to be celebrated in a mainstream book, maybe it doesn't need to be fought for. For example, years ago when being gay was widely considered immoral, smaller, fringe gay activist groups agitated for rights while the mainstream wouldn't support them. So maybe the people who really need our help are the people we aren't hearing from yet. 

Personally I had some problems with what was celebrated in this book and didn't agree with everything the contributors were saying. Someone was talking about how we should understand other cultures, like how their African friend wasn't comfortable with a couple sitting together. There was also a guy who was 7 feet tall at ~15 and after playing basketball for a bit got scouted for a team - what is the moral there? Be born with immense genetic privilege? (It's probably to make the most of the talents you're given, and the guy seems nice - it just reminded me how much of success in sports and other elite fields is due to innate genetic talents). And someone trying to help disabled students in their school by getting everyone to wear sunglasses for a day to 'understand what it feels like to have autism' (???).

The ARC was also formatted terribly. Obviously, the whole point of an Advanced Readers Copy is that it isn't finished, so you're not supposed to comment on exact quotes or formatting, but this was done to a far lower standard than any of the many ARCs I've read before - lots of 'insert ending here' or 'insert illustration here' and pictures in the middle of sentences. 

Recommendations

What I hoped for from this book was a collection of stories with different methods of changing the world, but it only gave me a couple, like petitions and fundraising. The book even says at the end that it has a list of tips for changing the world, but they're not very useful.

The book is probably good for inspiring young teenagers to make something of themselves, but doesn't live up to the promise of the title.