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From Pullman's His Dark Materials and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to Lewis' Narnia novels or the tale of Mr H. Potter, the series is often where young readers enter the seething and delightful universe of books, in a way that sets them up for life as readers.
My mother-in-law stood up on the night before her daughter married me, held her glass aloft, and sighed, 'Let's just hope this one comes off'. Some of the best toasts I ever heard were from children: 'Here's to all mum's husbands past and present!' said one girl, aged 11.
What if all the cars and sports teams we name for fleet and powerful animals and cosmic energies and cool-sounding things that don't exist or mean anything are, effective immediately, renamed for literary characters and authors.
Marriages are houses and unless you keep cleaning, repainting and using duct tape with deft punctilio, everything sags and mould wins. The first divorce I saw up close, like the first car crash you see up close, is imprinted on the inside of my eyelids.
Jimmy was a high school basketball superstar, who went to war after graduating and had both his hands blown off by a mine. Imagine a world where instead of violence, international disputes were decided via epic sports tournaments.
It is a useful truth that every real feat is built on a mountain of failures. The price for poetry's occasional power is the ocean of self-indulgent, mewling muck produced and published annually under the tattered banner of the Poem.
At 1am I noticed that the dad of a friend of mine was in the corner drinking hard and telling funny stories. He got drunker and drunker until, at about 3am, he started shouting and cursing and some glass smashed. Finally he fell down.
A nun once said cancer is a dance partner you don't like, but with whom you have to dance, and either you die or the cancer fades into the darkness at the other end of the ballroom. The words we use about cancers and wars matter more than we know.
When you get hit by a bullet you never ever forget what it feels like. It feels like you got hit with the biggest rock there ever was. We were going along in the boat and we went around a beach where there was a battle, and a slug hit me in the armpit and knocked me right over.
When I heard John McCain had chosen 'Palin' as his running mate, I thought, wow, Michael Palin! Palin understands women (he's worn his share of dresses), animal rights (especially dead parrots), and commerce (particularly the cheese industry).
Divorce is an incredibly powerful and painful chapter in millions of lives every year. Maybe we should create a public ritual for the end of a marriage by which we honour their brave attempt and mourn the death of love and hope.
As a reader, it's satisfying to reach that moment when you realise you don't have to finish the book you've been ploughing through. A book's unfinishability reflects less on the reader than on the writer. Even great writers flop sometimes.
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