I have a vital-most request,
For you my Ffforum friends
Please tell me,if you have the time,
Of your most favourite ends.

My dears,I am always wind blown away by your book cleverness so I would, if you have a momentspace to care, like to ask you to tell me what your finest book endings are. How do goodmost endings work? What words do they use and in what order? Tell me the glorybest endings of the greatest books? Tell me them! And then we will play a game of BookEnds?

How do you begin a game about Endings? What rules? Perhaps you should tell me the best endings and I should have to thinkguess them?

Can you help?

What is the perfect end?

Please help!

This message has an end now, but I'm not thinking it is glorymost!

YG

Niebla

Thought you needed stuff to keep books from falling over. I find a rock works well if it is big enough.

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

I like Brave New World.

After some of the deep thoughts about society in that book, it's good to see he came round to a happy end.

Loved the endings of 'One Hundred years of Solitude' & 'The Life of Pi'. I Immediately had to re-read them both because when you got to the end, you realised that there was a completely different story going on from the one you thought there was.

Bah!

Society aint that special apparently.

(Launch rant)

A couple of grown men started beating up a boy at the bus stop today. Myself and another girl had just jumped up to intervene when, luckily, a fella from the CFA who happened to be driving past put his sirens on and scared the men off who thought he was the police. The men jumped into their friend's cars (can you believe they actually had friends waiting for them with the engines running? that makes a team of four men to attack one weedy boy!) and zoomed away, only to come back a few moments later to yell death threats to him and the three of us who were trying to make sure he was okay. Unfortunately, I see them around my college a fair bit because they are all students there too, and the boy always seems to catch the same bus as me to the train station.

Then I got on the bus (Which was 35 minutes late, improving my temper no end...) and answered a question from the woman I sat next to about what had happened and was everyone ok. The man sitting behind me butted in with "The kid probably deserved it" and came up with all sorts of excuses for the two men belting the boy. I admit I was perhaps a little loud in my assertion that their behaviour was not on, I think the word dispicable cropped up several times, and he kept on and on. He actually said "That's the way society is these days" as a justification!

Now I'm easy to bait, so when he said it was probably fair because it was probably coming to him, and I asked if he thought two grown men against one fifteen year old boy was fair, he said "Don't tell me about it, or I'll take *YOU* out", I of course told him how very mature that was, and how brave it must be to beat up on women and children.

He eventually conceeded that the men were cowards, not because two of them belted the boy, but because they ran away when confronted themselves.
I literally had to shut down and stare at the seat in front of me or else I was probably going to say something that would get me thrashed (He was a very VERY big man...) but kept answering the questions the woman asked me, and trying to ignore the moron behind me butting in with his comments (not that he had seen it or anything- he'd been on the bus which hadn't arrived yet when all this happened). The woman beside me agreed with me, and started telling him off for getting aggro at me and for defending the two men's actions, no matter what the back story was, and I rather felt she was making herself a possible target for this man too, so I told her not to waste her breath because he wasn't going to listen to our point of view anyway... But that he actually believed it was alright for thuggery to be a basis for society... Urgh. And from the look of him, he certainly lived by that principal.

Once he had gotten off the bus, the woman beside me said "His not got a very good attitude, when he saw the kid on the ground with the man and you girls checking on him, he said "Oh good, one less taxpayer funded student to worry about"

SIGH

If that's society. I want out. And my iPod started playing up... I've not had a very nice day :(

Poor BK what a day! Be sure that we are not all like that.

Luckily I have a six pack of lime and vodka UDLs to help me get over it.

O foggy one, you wanted the perfect ending and something for you to guess.

Any book where I finish it, sit quietly for a few minutes, then put the book down has the perfect ending.

One for you to guess:
'I am certain of it,' he said.
'And then you will be happy!'
He looked at her in mild surprise. 'How do you mean, mother, "happy"?'
Although I suppose that the line "The end of the first volume" is the actual end.

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My computer beat me at chess, but I won at kickboxing

OOOH!
I thinks I knows that one! :)

Hands off! leave it for Niebla.

Yes, sir :P

Niebla:

Actually, the ending of 'Niebla' is interesting, if only for the twist of having the author involved in his own story.

I like books with an unexpected twist in the tale (e.g. Life of Pi,as ibborobb said). It can't be a 'deus ex machina' though - has to be a genuine twist. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a good example - the end of the story seems to be very pessimistic but, if people bother to read the annex (which a lot of people don't...), it's quite a surprise.

'Series' books which don't actually have an ending but more of a signpost to the possibilities of a new story (such as the finesome scribblings of the Great Panjandrum himself, Jasper Fforde) are usually good - they leave the reader wanting more. Philip Reeve, Philip Pullman, Phil Rickman (there's a pattern here...), Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, etc. etc. etc. - reading their first books made me want to buy them all.

Kitten: sorry to hear about your experiences, particularly with the irksome oik on the bus. Perhaps a way to curtail the bigotry of people like that is to ask them if they'd take the same view if it was someone they cared about. Provided, of course, that they do care about someone other than themselves...

Peace, love and cherry pie to you all, people.
picard1109

I think he'd happily use puppies for golfing practise...

And a deus ex machina ending can work very well, provided it makes sense for the story.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2007 07:48AM by Bonzai Kitten.

Books in a series can be fine, but they only entertain me so far before I want a plot line that actually seems to be going somewhere.... Our Mr. Fforde does an excellent job of writing endings that leave you wanting the next book, but not being completely in the dark if you don't read on. When I was in Junior High, I read the Animorphs and Everworld series(es)(?) which never really ended, and I just had to stop because they dragged on without a direction to the plot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You kids with your long hair and Baroque music...

I read them as well, but I eventually stopped because I was getting into longer, higher-level books. Incidentally, Animorphs did end, and the last three or four books do lead up to a finish (I stopped a couple books before that point).

Here's an ending to the fourth book of a four book cycle:

But far, on the rock above the see, a rider stood, of mid-size, her head backward in the saddle of her horse, the eyes white and blue in the nightly sky, thyme redolent from the heath, and a sweet tremble passed through her that noone saw, and her lips whipered three words that noone heard, italian words, as sometimes...she said astounding things in that...astounding idiom.
And these three words, which noone perceives but my auditory, indicate to us, that soon, after the mourning at court be ended, a silky ciel will close, the highest nobility will bow the lowest, the curtain of the royal bridal bed, under abbating breath of the great-dignitaries, will lightly, just lightly, piano, pianissimo...billow:
"Dammi il paradiso"

---

I have no idea if "The blue chamberlain" by Wolf von Niebelschütz was ever translated, so here it was done by me, hopefully without making too many mistakes.

Did the animorphs series really actually finish? Astounding. I stopped reading them in favor of more...advanced books, but mostly I stopped because my mother began pushing me out of the juvenile novel isles of the bookstore.

I hope that book has been translated. It sounds beautiful!

I think my favorite book ending will be the one that ends with the word "scar". Can't be sure though... I'll let you know after July 21st.

Thankyou most my fffriends for you helpings so far, I am exploring these endings and they will assisting oh yes.

I have started reading the endings to many much of the books you mentioninged and I must say that manymost of them seemed to make little sense, although I am suremost they are good. Perhappenchance I will read the rest of the books when I have more time. Although as of this today I have muchlittle time. Prinzhilde, I manymuchmost liked your ending, but I can't beguess it yet. It made me feel strange and wobblesome.

Skidmarks, I am puzzle most by your riddlemeroo, I am thinking hard but can you clue me about this book? Is the book a classic or a new one? What does it say on page 49? Who by is it?

Please keep helpmosting, I am very moved by you all. You are much most my friends.

YG

Niebla