About

This blog was started because of this book, and not because the book was a good one.

I am an autistic adult and I read a lot of books about autism or other developmental disorders or special educational needs. I read them to get a better understanding of the children and teenagers I work with, the field of special educational needs, my own world, and the world at large.

There’s a lot of books out there on autism. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are okay and some are awful. Some of them contain terrible advice that at best is ignorant and misinformed and at worst potentially dangerous if people were to follow the author’s advice. What I found especially horrifying was how many of these potentially dangerous books had positive ratings on places like Amazon and Goodreads.

That’s where the blog came in. I decided I would review every single book I had or borrowed on autism and review them. This slowly moved into reviewing other books related to disability or other special educational needs.

I have messed around with the format of the blog on and off over the past few years, trying new things and taking over things out before finally settling on the idea that I would run another blog alongside this one called ‘Life on Autism‘, where any thoughts prompted by the books I read (along with thoughts in general) would end up. A recent overhaul in January 2018 will likely see all the non-book related posts migrated across to Life on Autism, keeping Books on Autism refocused as a review site.

A few final notes:

• I read all kinds of books on autism/SEN. I read books written by autistic people, I read books by people who aren’t autistic. I read books on interventions and view points that I don’t personally agree with because I think it’s important to know exactly what’s being written and read about autism because it will affect my life and my career. I will tag the general topic of the books to help with filtering/avoiding.
• My personal language preference is to say “I have autism” but in my writing I generally use person-first and identity-first language interchangeably. This is to acknowledge the different preferences for people within the autistic/autism community.
• I am happy to review books that fall within the scope of this blog if you want to send a copy through – physical or ebook – just use the contact me link in the top bar menu.