★★★★★ What is happiness? I am certain he was happy when surrounded by all the wonders of the world and knowledge, but if life is a cycle, nothing is permanent. Forgiveness and salvations.
🔽 log 🔽 Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes, 1966 256 pages Read in 2026.02
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
This book is too personal and can't help to think in my surrounding situation, but let's try not to be objective.
This book asks the big question, what is happiness?
As Charlie gets smarter, a girl at the bakery mentions the garden of Eden, that God doesn't want us to go beyond what's given to us, quite frankly, she's saying it's wrong to be smart.
Was he happy that he got a lot smarter than everyone around him, was it a good thing?
I think he was happy, to be surrounded by the wonders of the world, he absorbed all the knowledge that almost all of us cannot reach.
Then he struggles as he lose the super power, but like any of us who get old and old enough to go sinile, I don't think it's a bad thing to return to our simple selves, it's a cycle.
You gain something, you also eventually lose that something.
Knowledge is power, sometime too powerful and harmful if we only focus on the power, but like the cycle of life, knowledge in a person is temporary, and he understood it, he decided to live every stage fully.
It also made me thing of one's role in a community, and coming from the US where they focus on the individualism, it's even more interesting that he finds peach in the given role.
Then, at the end, was the mother a bad person?
Was she bad to wish he was "normal"?
It's easy to say she was evil if you have been taught correctly at school, but if you have never experienced the desperation to realise that your child would never have "normal" conversations and "normal" work like other kids, you cannot dismiss her as bad.
She forgot to love her son, she was too focused on her unhappy self, the despair made her blind.
In the end, we are all selfish, but this book is a reminder that we always mean well and we don't want to hurt people around us, it's just it's difficult to juggle it all.
Glad that this book is full of salvations and forgiveness.
★★★★☆ For children aged 2-3 years and just been diagnosed. The interesting thing was to learn the rationale behind the step to take though.
🔽 log 🔽 An Early Start for Your Child with Autism: Using Everyday Activities to Help Kids Connect, Communicate, and Learn Sally J Rogers, etc, 2012 342 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Clearly it was too late to read this, this is for children aged 2-3 years and just been diagnosed. We've already done or already doing all the steps...
The interesting thing was to learn the rationale behind the step to take, good to read it properly rather than just guessing, however correct it was.
The later chapters were more appropriate like speech, but the whole book is really for the newly diagnosed, so if that's your family's case, then a great book.
★★★★☆ Written for assistant teachers at school, so not home or therapist, but useful even for parents.
🔽 log 🔽 Autismo. Cosa fare (e non) Guida rapida per insegnanti. Scuola primaria Marco Pontis, 2021 150 pages Read 2024.8 (English not available)
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 For Italian teachers. Written for assistant teachers at school, so not home or therapist, but useful even for parents.
Nothing new specifically to note (it doesn't go deep, and assumes it's for a classroom) but good to read in Italian and normally what they suggest is consistent in various books.
★★★★☆ It’s revealing, beautiful and almost magical. His love for nature, his strong wish with to be with other people and be understood – these are refreshing and optimistic, but how it’s written as a book feels too “comforting” for others
🔽 log 🔽 The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism Naoki Higashida, 2016 自閉症の僕が跳びはねる理由～会話のできない中学生がつづる内なる心～東田直樹
208 pages Read in 2022.03
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
It's revealing, beautiful and almost magical. Not only that, his love for nature and being with others, his strong wish to be with other people and be understood - these are refreshing and revealing but also optimistic, and I must say, comforting.
It's comforting for people who know little about children with autism. This book will make you feel moved instantly and I cannot help but think that it's carefully crafted by savvy adults.
We should not forget that it's a book from this particular and talented 13 year old boy. He's articulate, even if he doesn't speak in a conventional way and that's great and that's a big hope for parents, but this is one person on the spectrum.
Definitely need to read in Japanese, which should be closer to how it was originally written by him (and not involving a famous writer) and I'd like to read more of his books, how he is progressing with his writing.
赤パンの本棚 