Dangerous vs. Daring

I won't make you read through this entire post to find out how i feel about these books. I liked The Dangerous Book for Boys far more than The Daring Book for Girls. You may think one is for boys and one is for girls, and Seth is a boy, so of course he would like the one for boys. Not true, i say! There is the possibilty i am judging the book by its cover, but it's not because of a gender bias, it's because of two other reason.

First, the color. I find red far more appealing than, well, i don't even know what to call the color of Daring. Is it blue? No, it's green. How about aqua? I have it---turqoise! The truth is, in western society, the majority of both males and females (although more males than females) describe blue as a favorite color because of it's soothing and calming nature, so shouldn't Dangerous be colored blue? The color for Daring, however, is right on. Females in western society prefer, first blue, then green, so blue-green, i.e. turqoise, is the perfect choice.

Oh, but silly me, i overanalyse. Red is the worldly accepted color for danger, making it the perfect choice for a "dangerous" book. My, those marketing experts are clever, aren't they?

Besides my color bias, i have a definite bias towards the word "dangerous" as opposed to the word "daring". Honestly, if you had to choose an adjective to describe yourself, would you choose dangerous or daring? I would choose dangerous---it sounds so much more appealing and substantive. The word daring reminds me of someone who accepts a school-yard dare, e.g. "I triple-dog-dare you to lick the flagpole", and we all know what happened there. Also, when i think of daring, i think of Daredevil, as in Daredevil the movie. If you have no idea what i'm talking about, consider yourself lucky.

By the way, have i mentioned my obsession with packaging? I'll have to post in far greater detail about packaging sometime in the future---you'll think i'm crazy (or even more crazy than you already know i am).

Enough of my rambling and more about the actual contents of both books. Both have a good mix of light reading and fun activities. The reading contains fun stories, for example Dangerous includes famous battles, like the Battle of Thermopylae (recently made famous by 300 the movie---this one you do want to see), and Daring advocates famous women throughout history, from Cleopatra to Marie Curie. And although the history lessons are nice, the best parts of the books are definitely the activities, like how to build a treehouse, fold a paper airplane, write in code, tie knots, play card games, etc...all the basic, fun kid stuff we all should have experienced at one point in our childhood, stuff that fosters kids' imaginations and physical well-being---what we should be doing instead of watching TV or playing video games (not to say video games aren't a lot of fun). If you or your kids are bored one afternoon, you can easily pull out one of these books and find something exciting to do for hours.

Another great part of these books is the index includes a list of books every boy or girl should read. This list alone as a reference is invaluable. And here's something else intersting---both books have website support! The interactive books of today are no longer the Choose Your Own Adventure books we remember (although those have a website now too). The Dangerous and Daring sites both have blogs, downloadable completeion badges, a form to request a certificate of completion signed by the authors, and lots of other extras. Amazing!

The truth is, I would recommend buying both books. Costco carries both, each of them under $15. A very worthwhile investment for not only hours of light reading, but also days worth of fun activities. But if you had to choose between them, the key indicator for me of which book i liked more is how long it took me to read them. I finished Dangerous within a few weeks (one of those weeks was when we were adventuring through the Mayan Riviera and Cancun). I've had to toil through Daring for almost four months before finishing it.