101 Books to Read Before You Die discussion

Post comments about chapters 21 through the end of the book here.

I'm not sure how I felt about this one over all. The first half where the adventures are in finding the salvation of Fantastica is what the film focuses on, and I'm not sure if my preference for that section is because of the nostalgia of the film, or because it was that much more interesting.

It gets much more intellectual in the second half, learning what one's truest desires are, but it also gets quite dark. Definitely something interesting to discuss with a child, but one who isn't afraid of getting "stuck" in another world.

My copy had different colored font depending on if Bastian was in the "real" world or in Fantastica; was this the same in yours? Also, in the film, the world is called "Fantasia." Was that a Hollywood choice, or does it appear differently in another translation?

All of the chapters start with the alphabet in order, which is interesting: in English there are 26 letters, but the German language has some additional vowels, so I wonder if the book was modified to reflect that, including the part where the 26 letters are mentioned? Or in German are the vowels just considered variations rather than separate letters? I understood the to be separate, but for linguistic purposes, they may not be.

Leave it to a linguistics nerd to focus on the language aspects and structure more than the story itself :)