Books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

‘And what if I wave my wand and nothing happens?’‘Throw it away and punch him on the nose,’ Ron suggested.Wingardium Leviosa!’ he shouted, waving his long arms like a windmill.‘You’re saying it wrong,’ Harry heard Hermione snap. ‘It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, make the “gar” nice and long.’‘You do it, then, if you’re so clever’ Ron snarled.Hermione rolled up the sleeves of her gown, flicked her wand and said, Wingardium Leviosa!’Their feather rose off the desk and hovered about four feet above their heads.

The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant and soft than it was over the moor. The robin flew down from his treetop and hopped about or flew after her from one bush to another. He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing her things. Everything was strange and silent and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from anyone, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all. All that troubled her was her wish that she knew whether all the roses were dead, or if perhaps some of them had lived and might put out leaves and buds as the weather got warmer. She did not want it to be a quite dead garden.

It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

First of all, let me get something straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY told her to get one that didn’t say “diary” on it. Great. All I need is for some jerk to catch me carrying this book around and get the wrong idea.

My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.