The Neverending Story

Back in middle school, I quite liked going to the school library. A fair number of the books I read back then have stuck with me, and one of them is The Neverending Story.

There are a few reasons this book stayed with me, and one of them is a novel I wrote as a middle schooler. At the time I thought, what if I tried writing a novel? — and ended up writing about six pages of an opening on my own. It was a story about being transported to another world — a genre that’s everywhere these days but barely existed back then — and later, when I borrowed The Neverending Story from the library, it was in a way an isekai story too. Maybe that’s why it felt similar to the novel I’d been trying to write, and I remember enjoying it a lot.

The reason I picked it up at the library was, plainly, its ridiculous thickness. At that age I was drawn to books that somehow looked impressive, and being in the middle of my edgy middle-school phase, I probably wanted to read something that made me look deep, or something like that.. But when I actually opened it, it turned out to be a perfectly ordinary fantasy novel, which made it easy to read — that helped too.

It was so thick that when I put it in my school desk drawer, that one book alone nearly filled it to the top — I still remember that. I read it bit by bit during breaks and lunchtime, and had a great time with it. There was a day I was so absorbed in a novel that I didn’t even notice class had started — I’m not sure it was this book, but it does seem like the prime suspect.

If I jot down the plot as best I remember: a boy is drawn into a bookshop, ends up stealing a book that catches his eye, and as he reads it he finds himself inside the world of the book; eventually he saves that world and returns to his own. Something roughly like that. It might feel a bit predictable these days, but storytelling like this wasn’t common back then. The original came out in 1979, so it was pretty early, wasn’t it? Or maybe I just didn’t know better..

The ending has stayed with me too. Once you’re absorbed enough to read all the way through, the book closes with a blank page — meaning that, true to its title, the story hasn’t ended and keeps going. As I mentioned in a movie review a while back, I love it when two different scenes intersect, so I really loved that device: leaving a blank page in the book so that the book the protagonist reads turns out to be the very book I’m reading right now.

Even though I read this book a very long time ago, so much of it has stayed with me — which is why I picked it as my first book review.