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Oh, and what's next? "The Giving Tree"?

"The Giving Tree" is the most horrifically depressing and disturbing thing I've ever read. Its thesis appears to be that life consists of unremitting, thankless, self-destructive personal sacrifice in pursuit of the trivial, shallow goals of another, leavened only after your death by the thought that you've, for five minutes, caused someone a brief comfort (not even, really, happiness).

Amazon recommended it to me as something for my young sort-of-god-daughter's birthday, and I'm so glad I flicked through a copy in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop first to check it over -- I was near-suicidal by the end of it. And people read it to kids?

Peter