Boys Own Stuff

When a book's pages fall out in chunks of 100 at a time, this can tell you three things; 1. The book was poorly made. 2. The book received constant attention and eventually fell apart from to much love. Or, 3, the owner is just a crappy owner and let harm come to his or her book. In my case with Boys Own Stuff, I believe it was a combination of the three. Now I know that at the moment you are probably ignoring the second point, and probably the first to a certain degree, and so I want to impress a point upon you. I do not intentionally let harm befall my books; on almost all occasions it was a simple mistake. For example, don't wrestle with your father when books are in the vicinity. Don't let your book and food come within one meter of each other. Never overlook the fact that backpacks, suitcases and messy lockers are death traps for book's covers. And of course don't huck books onto the floor or a bed. Follow all these rules, and you will be a better person then I am in the art of book preservation.
However I repeat that I still take good care of my books. Aside from the occasional ripped cover or stain, only two books of mine have all-out fallen apart. The Lord Of The Rings, in my defense, was something like thirty years old. As for Boys Own Stuff, I have already presented the reasons in the first sentence of this post. And if now you will ignore the first and third reasons, you will see that Boys Own Stuff was damaged mostly for one reason; it was a great book.
Boys Own Stuff is comprised of dozens of different guides on subjects that will lead you to "boyhood like it's meant to be." These range from "how to polish your shoes" to "build your own stomp rocket" to "SAS survival skills IV: finding and purifying water." as well as activities like these, the author included interesting stats such as those on fighter aces, and several entertaining stories. Perhaps one of my favorite features of the book is the section entitled "fifty movies every boy should see." As the title of the section implies, all the movies that I have so far seen I would recommend. If you are more into books then movies, however, lists of recommended books are also included. I however, was not to interested in most of the mentioned titles (ironic how I'm writing a book review blog and yet liked the movie list better...) and so couldn't tell you if the books mentioned truly deserve the spotlight. And perhaps that is the beauty of the book; I didn't care for that particular section of the book (or many others for that matter),  but I still found dozens of sections that I enjoyed reading and re-reading. This book has a medal in the mind of yours truly for the best travelled book in my collection; ever since receiving this book two or three years ago, I have not gone on vacation without Boys Own Stuff in tow.  It is truly indispensable. 8/10 stars.

-Mark

As always, thanks for reading and leave a comment below! You can contact me at m.jones10@hotmail.ca or in the commons if you have any questions. Thanks!