In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.