Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

This is a very interesting read. It's really quite a fascinating look at political matters, the way people live in other, less westernised countries and, most importantly, the lengths that people will go to in order to help themselves. All they need is the resources, which are so very hard to come by. Greg Mortenson, however, makes sure that they get them.

This book is partly about the development and work of the Central Asia Institute (much to my disappointment, this doesn't fit the requirements of my Middle Eastern challenge as a result) and the work they do. It's also partly about Greg Mortenson - who he is, why he is the way he is and so on. It's not really a biography, though it's certainly biographical. It's a weird mix of things. It's definitely worth reading, though it can be heavy-going in places.

Harry Potter

Ah, Harry Potter. It had to happen eventually. I own all seven books, I have read them all and I occasionally reread them. The first one I read was Goblet of Fire, the fourth book. I was working/volunteering at a convent school in England. The book was lying in the senior common room, so I picked it up and read it. It was a good book. When I came home, I went about purchasing and reading the rest of them.

This is a good series. It's fun, mostly well-written and full of glorious details. The books centre around Harry Potter, the Boy who Lived, and his experiences at wizarding school. Though, really, if any of you don't actually know this I'd be very surprised.

The earlier books are much better than the later ones, in my personal opinion. The earlier books are very much school stories with, of course, the obligatory adventure at the end. My favourite of these is Prisoner of Azkaban, though I am very fond of Chamber of Secrets as well. The later books are far more action-oriented - they are far more in the adventure style than in the school style. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the books lengthen and the plots suffer for it. It's hard to pick a favourite here, but I'd go for either Goblet of Fire or Order of the Phoenix. Phoenix does have the problem of making me cringe, but then Goblet of Fire has the problem of Hermione looking drastically different in the same way that no-one recognises Superman when he puts on different clothes and glasses. It's ridiculous. There are increasing plot-holes and bad characterisation as the series goes on.

I'm not going to detail my every objection to the series, but Rowling needs some practice at writing believable teenage romance and angst. She could also have used a better, less star-struck editor who was capable of spotting the glaring errors and fixing them. I cannot complain too much though, given the horrific editing of some of my favourite books (here including Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, but not Tolkien). I will, however, complain about the way that she 'develops' her characters. They not only grow, they regress. Now, while I grant that there is some cause for some of this, occasionally she just takes a character and disregards their entire personality and turns them into someone else with the same name (and yes, I'm thinking particularly of Cho here). I also think that a few of her supporting characters are a little too two-dimensional and could have been far better developed, considering the length of time she had to develop them in all the enormous tomes she wrote.

I don't think very much of the movies, but that's mostly because of the way that they deviate from the books. The errors that the books make are bad enough - there is no need to compound them by making even worse errors in the movies. They did, in my opinion, have very good casting for the most part.

And, a word about the covers. I for one like the majority of the covers. There is only one I object to and that's the one for Deathly Hallows. The artwork seems out of character with the rest in the sequence. I would have much preferred for all the artwork to have been done by one artist, preferably one of the ones that did Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. I do not like the covers by the artist who did the ones in the Afrikaans translation (and possibly the books that were published in the States? It's hard to tell). There are also the 'adult' covers. Entirely unnecessary in my opinion, but some people are weird about their book covers. I personally don't usually care too much about the cover (except when it comes to my Enid Blytons' - I don't want the covers to be too modern 'cause those covers tend to be awful).

Anyway, if you haven't read these, you probably should.

Equal Education and Shine

Just a quick note to talk about the Bookery that is where Charly's Bakery used to be on Roeland Street. I'm sure there are similar places in the areas where you live. I will now be donating my unwanted books to them (unless they're 'unsuitable'). Equal Education is calling for every school in South Africa to have a functioning library with a librarian or other qualified administrator to run it. It has been shown that the pass rate is higher in schools with libraries (though I cannot actually locate the citation they give - maybe you can: Bhorat & Oosthuizen 2008). And, quite frankly, I cannot imagine going to a school that didn't have a library. How do these children cope?

A similar movement is the Shine Centre, which targets specific children in a few schools (I don't know if they do it anywhere other than Cape Town though) and helps them to raise their literacy level. Essentially, it's an hour a week of reading with them as they just don't get enough attention in the overcrowded classrooms and are failing.

So if you can, support these ventures or similar ones near you. The future of the world depends on a literate body of people (also, this might all go towards showing the government that books are not 'luxury items' and dropping the tax on them).

St. Clare's

Among other things, I discovered that the Wellness Warehouse has a market every second Saturday. Included in the market is a book stand belonging to Help the Rural Child, which is some sort of charity, similar in nature to CAFDA. Their prices are higher, but I was impressed by the selection (hello Enid Blyton and Cadfael!) Unluckily I didn't have my list with me, but I only bought one duplicate, which is actually in better condition, so the other will be going to CAFDA. I do tend to use CAFDA rather like a library - if I don't like a book I just take it back.

This series was written before Blyton's other school series Malory Towers (I'll get to that one some time). I like each series for different reasons. And there are a couple of reasons why I don't particularly like either series sometimes. I'll leave the comparisons for when I review Malory Towers though. The only book in the series that I don't own is Second Form at St. Clare's. There are a number of girls that make up the form we're interested in, chief of which are the O'Sullivan Twins, Pat and Isabel. They start off as terribly stuck-up and unwilling, but learn to be model heroines. Naturally all the stereotypes are there - the arty girl, the musical girl, the sporty girl, the pretty girl, the rich girl, the spiteful girl, the mousy girl. Nevertheless this is a fun series with interesting characters that still seem fairly fresh.

Arguments have been made that Malory Towers is a far better series simply because Blyton's daughters had started at boarding school by then and she had a better idea of how things worked. As it happens, I myself have never been to boarding school (though I did work in one for a year) and I really can't tell what differences there are that make Malory Towers seem more real than St. Clare's. One of the things I particularly like about St. Clare's (and which infuriates me about Malory Towers, but we're not talking about that) is that as the series moves up into the higher forms we keep with the same characters. There is some interaction with the lower forms in the last book as the lower form girls have to wait on the older girls to a degree and one of the girls has a sister in the first form that year. At Malory Towers, however, the last couple of books move from a focus on the main characters to being half about the main characters' younger siblings and other relatives as if Blyton felt that the older girls wouldn't be interesting to her readers.

All in all this is a fun series that's worth reading and rereading. I even have some interest in having a look at the sequels written by Pamela Cox, though I'm not sure what they're like.

[I am reminded again why I don't like the whole multiple-pictures-per-post thing.]