Once Upon a Bookshelf

Capt. Hook is possibly one of the most notorious villians in childrens literature. He’s certainly my favourite, so I had to grab this book the moment I saw it. J.V. Hart (the same man who wrote the screenplay for the movie Hook) has written about Hook’s childhood, and how he went about becoming the character we all know and love him to be.

It starts when James begins to attend a boys boarding school. He is the bastard child of a Lord of the Queen’s court, and is judged by the fact that he is a bastard by most people he meets. The kids at Eton are, for the most part, exactly the same. And oh, the kids at Eton are horrible! Or at least, the older kids at Eton are horrible. James is a determined, though, to not let the older kids lord it over him right from the beginning when he draws his umbrella (as I’m sure it’s only because he didn’t have a sword handy) on one Arthur Darling. This, of course, is only the beginning of the animosty between the two boys.

Things escalate when James, the girl he loves, and his best friend, attempt to commandeer a boat. And this is where all the fun starts, let me tell you.

You know how with some books, you can fall in love in an instant? You were enjoying it alright, but then all of a sudden out of the blue, BAM! You’re in love with it. That happened to me in the middle of the fifth chapter of this book, with one sentence:

The vengeful young man had discovered a universal truth that his adversary had known since his early days with Aunt Emily entertaining her theatrical friends - for every life situation there is a fitting quote from the hand of Shakespeare.

Any book that talks about how wonderful quoting Shakespeare is, is automatically going to be a wonderful book in my opinion. Especially a children’s book! It’s like… a wonderful dream come true where everyone uses wonderful phrases and words and … oh hurrah!

Also, for someone who loves the bratty kids that everyone else seems to hate, I was certainly in my element. There were so many kids to hate in this book! Okay, maybe not that many, but Hook was certainly a little brat, and then there was Arthur Darling and his gang who were completely horrible too. It was wonderful! I couldn’t decide who I loved all the more, and that’s very unusual for me.

The book has also given me a bit more of insight into the character of Hook. Now, though, I’m really wanting to see the first couple of meetings between Hook and Pan.

This book has been monopolizing all of my time lately. Both in good ways and bad ways. I was only able to get through about a half a chapter at a time before I had to put the book down and walk away for the day in order to absorb everything I had read. I also didn’t want to get involved in another book as it might distract me from this one, because I’ve been meaning to read this book for about a year now and have only gotten around to it now. Le Sigh.

Anyway, it’s co-written by a couple of Canadian university professors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, and is about countercultures - how they aren’t harming the system at all, but are a part of the system, and are actually driving consumerism in our society.

I’ve taken some courses at university and college that have talked about a lot of the stuff covered in the book, and I always find it very intriguing. It was good to be able to go over things that I’ve heard before in a bit more depth than I was able to in classes, and they presented some new (to me) ideas that left me thinking for a while.

What I enjoyed reading most about in this book was everything Heath and Potter had to say about advertising and media. I’m going to be graduating from college next week, and so will be starting my life as a Graphic Designer, and so I’ll most likely be doing a lot of advertising in my lifetime. They had a lot of interesting things to say, along how advertising isn’t quite as evil as people think it is, as well as how a lot of time it is not to make you change your habits but to reinforce habits that you already have. One of my favourite passages on that was this:

None of this is to say that advertising is completely harmless, that it has no effect on either our minds or our consumption habits. What we need to realize, though, is that advertising is less like brainwashing and more like seduction. Just as a skillful seduction exploits the fact that on some level you actually want to have sex, so effective advertising can work on needs and desires that you already have. You can’t seduce someone who doesn’t have an interest in sex, and you can’t sell teeth whitener to someone who is not concerned about his appearance.

Muchly to my disgust, I came down with the flu a couple of days ago, and everyone knows what that’s like. When you’re not sleeping, you might have the energy to stare dumbly at the television. If you’re lucky, you’ll get bored enough of sleeping and staring off into space in order to pick up a book. So, I was looking for something that wouldn’t make me think too much, and decided after all of Rach’s ravings about the series, to give The Theif a try.

The book is about a boy, Gen, who claims that he can steal anything. Unfortunately, one of his escapades goes bad, and he ends up in prison. The magus releases Gen from jail in order to help the magus steal something from another country.

About half way through the book, I stopped reading it in order to check out the “extras” in the back of the book (The Real World Behind Gen’s World, ‘A Good Book is a Good Book Forever’ and Gen’s Next Adventure!), and I have to admit that the fact that Turner mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and that she was looking forward to seeing the movie really endeared Turner to me, as I am still of the opinion that Howl is one of the sweetest stories I’ve read (and seen) in a long time.

Although I found this book quite predictable (how many times have we seen the guy everyone thinks is gutterscum turn out to be someone important that no one expects?), it kept me amused. I’m not sure if I’ll go out and buy The Queen of Attolia or The King of Attolia, but I’ll probably end up borrowing them from the library.

Magyk is the first book in the Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage.

I always find it frustrating when I read reviews about books that compare them to other books; there’s a review on the back of this book that mentions Harry Potter, so of course, I’m going to sit here reading this book and just comparing it to Potter… and in all honesty, I don’t see how they are comparable at all. Sure, they both have magic and wizards in it, but Potter just seems to be on a different level completely. (This coming from the person who refused to have anything to do with the Potter books and movies until after Goblet of Fire had been released and she made a deal with a friend - if she read Lord of the Rings, I’d read Harry Potter. Needless to say, she never got through The Two Towers, but I’m addicted to HP. Go figure.)

Septimus Heap is the seventh son of a seventh son, which is a very powerful thing in a lot of magical worlds. Unfortunately, Septimus died on the night that he was born. Or at least that’s what the Heaps have been led to believe. The same day of Septimus’ birth, the Queen is murdered and her infant daughter is left orphaned. This daughter has been left in the care of the Heaps.

Ten years later, an evil wizard attempts to have the Princess killed (again), and the Heaps have to go into hiding - along with the Kingdom’s Head Wizard, and a boy from the Young Army that they had saved from freezing to death. But the evil wizard won’t give up that easily; he and his Apprentice (the seventh son of a seventh son) take over the kingdom and attempt to hunt the Princess down.

Most of the adults in this book strike me as rather eccentric - or at least all of the “good” adults - which was certainly amusing enough. I mean, who in their right mind would wear shiny, pointy, purple snakeskin pumps on a day to day basis? And the kids were adorable - even the sulky Apprentice.

The one thing that really bothered me about this book, though, is about the boy from the Young Army. Boys in the Young Army are taught to hate everything to do with magic. So, this kid, he doesn’t talk for most of the book, and then all of a sudden when he does start speaking, he’s spouting off all this information about spells and charms. I suppose he had been learning quite a bit while in hiding with the Heaps, but it just seemed too rushed.

Regardless of the fact that I was constantly comparing it to Harry Potter, I found this to be a very cute book. Even though it’s the first book in a series, it feels a lot like a standalone book, and although I don’t NEED to read the rest of the series, I probably will just because, as I said, it’s cute.