his book has a special significance for me, because it was the first big book I ever read. I was about 9 years old and I remember the movie had been in the cinemas and the theme song was in the top 10. I am not sure why or how I came to read it, but I am glad I didn't see the movie first. The movie is awful.

The movie only depicts what really was only the first half of the book. They made sequels but none of them finished the first book. The first half is a nice story by itself but it is only really the prologue, establishing the setting.

I am not really sure how to talk about it. Well, the beginning is where to start. Bastian Balthazar Bux is a 9 or 10 year old little boy, whose mother died some years before and now lives with his father only. At school, Bastian is constantly teased and not just by the bully kids but also by many of his teachers.

The story starts with him escaping into a book shop, after being chased by bullies from school, and the book shop man castigates him for making such a fuss arriving and being wet from rain outside. Then he gets a phonecall and disappears, and a book he was reading, very pretty with metallic cloth binding and a medallion with a black and a white snake coiled around each other with the tail of the other being bitten, the shop keeper leaves on the counter.

Bastian steals this book, and runs off, deeply disturbed by his crime and holes up in a vast attic at his school, and begins to read the book.

The movie only shows the story as far as the point the quest to find a human to rename the Childlike Empress completes, and the veil between Fantastica, the realm of imagination, and the "real world" is breached, and Bastian becomes the central character of the story.

They probably left out the second half for a good reason. Though it does not contain events with adult themes, it delves deeply into philosophy and psychology, and at times it is really difficult to cheer for the main character, whose wishes lead to worse and worse things.

Towards the end, as Bastian has traded his memories for wishes, to the point he no longer even remembers his name, comes the turning point of the story, and as I read this for the second time since I was 9 years old (31 years ago!) I was moved to tears.

The Neverending Story surely deserves to be regarded as one of the most beautiful and deep children's stories ever written. It is almost as though in some sense, the story is true, and the lesson is gently but thouroughly given - Beware of what you wish for, because it might just come true and turn out to be a hell you most feared.

If you have never read it, I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!

_{Loki was born in Australia, now is wandering Amsterdam again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.}

_{I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel}

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All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me