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Neil Gaiman was one of the screenwriters for Beowulf. My young family member BDT is teaching sixth grade this year, and he and his colleagues were reading a version of the epic-that-just-won't-go-away to their classes.

According to Salon, maybe they shouldn't be planning any field trips to see the movie. I was thinking of going, though. It's playing on IMAX nearby.

Well, young BDT put me to shame as a reader recently.

I gave him the first and third portions of The Bartimeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud and told him I had the second book, The Golem's Eye, but hadn't read it yet. It would be his as soon as I finished it.

Well, he immediately finished the first book, The Amulet of Samarkand, couldn't wait for me to read The Golem's Eye (which I hadn't even started), and ran out and bought another copy. Then, of course, he whipped through the third book, too.

Our young(er) reader thought the first book was "excellent" and the whole series "fantastic."

"Perhaps it is because I read them back to back to back," BDT speculated, "but I cannot recall another series that I thought flowed as well as this one did. The growth of the characters, especially Nathaniel, was amazingly well written."

BDT raised an interesting point. He compared Nathaniel in these books to Harry Potter. "Nathaniel was a Harry Potter with an attitude that I liked as well." In a later e-mail (He sent me three on these books.)he again compared Nathaniel to Harry "if he had Draco Malfoy's...attitude. Cocky, desperate to impress, and not afraid to backstab if need be." He also described Nathaniel as moving back and forth between Harry and Draco.

Now, at first I didn't agree with him at all because, as my faithful readers know, I'm not wild about Harry. But while I in no way want to suggest the Bartimeus books are derivative (their world is far more inventive and unique than the one Rowling creates in her books), perhaps Nathaniel could be described as a much, much darker Harry Potter. He's a child magician on his own in a cut-throat world, one in which the magical realm isn't separate from the human realm but has taken it over and subjugated it. In the Harry Potter books, Draco is pretty much just a cardboard schoolyard bully. But in Stroud's world only a fully realized Draco could survive.

The demon Bartimeus is the closest thing Nathaniel has to a moral guide and all that keeps him from tumbling right over into evil. Bartimeus a far more subtle and sophisticated character than Harry's Dumbledore.

So what did I think of the second book in the series, The Golem's Eye, when I finally read it? Well, I found the sections told from Kitty's point of view a little dull. She's a much more exciting character in the third book than she is in the second. And I thought the book was a little weak on golem, when you consider it's mentioned in the title. I found the political stuff a little murkier in this book, too.

But my reading of the first two books in the trilogy has always been undermined by the fact that I read the third, and perhaps the best, first. I can only imagine what a great experience it must have been for BDT reading these books in order.

We haven't heard from our young elementary school teacher, BDT, for a while, so I thought I'd do a post on what he had to say about Cybils' nominee, The Softwire: Virus on Orbis 1.

Some Cybils folks were just talking this past week about how few true science fiction nominations we received in the Fantasy/SciFi category. I think it's fair to say that The Softwire by P.J. Haarsma was the most hardcore nomination we saw. It had aliens. It had space travel. It had computers. It had humans interfacing with computers. Many of the traditional scifi bases were covered.

And covered pretty well.

BDT agreed for the most part:

"The story was good, but I found myself skimming through parts to get to the climax. The idea of human slavery in space was interesting; I also think that would be what would happen if we encountered "aliens". It seems they must be smarter than us, especially if they're already in space.

The book overall was quite good. It took me away from TV and videogames, which is saying something on my days off. I hope there will be a sequel."

BDT's prediction that we'll be enslaved if we encounter aliens reminded me of his uncle. Said uncle has always believed that if aliens come to Earth it would only be for one reason--to eat us. I guess his feeling is that the only reason to travel any distance is to go out to eat.

You can check out an article on author, P. J. Haarsma at Booklad. According to Booklad, new Softwire books will be coming out in August over the next three years, which should make BDT happy.

It's a long piece, but there's a lot of interesting material in it.

On Today’s Show: Save Our School : The Children of Selsted Primary Thank You To: Jeff Wood, Shannon Blaney, Wayne Serebrin, Yvonne Siu Runyan and Celia Oyler, for commenting on the show, contacting me regarding the show, or pinning my frappr map. And I also want to thank Allyn Kurin for the station ID. Congratulations To: Jeff Wood [...]