I think this is the only school book I liked.

Puberty had just taken effect and so I was tripping my balls off on hormones: "My boobs hurt. There is blood on my panties. I hate everyone. Does that dog have a clock on it?"

After the first 50 pages I know this will be on my bedside table for the rest of my life!

Featured in grandma reads sessions. . .

This was a joy to read in my youth, and was a joy to read in my oldth. Fantastic!

In my birth family, we kids learned from an early age that claiming "bored" as a status would get you assigned to long work details overseen by Herself (Our-Mother-In-Charge). You had one warning prior - scary, steely and said with brittle cheerfulness: "Boredom is a Choice. Don't make it." If you didn't immediately skulk off to a place where you could clearly exhibit Curiosity and Exploratory Effort, you'd best just go find gloves, heavy canvas coverings and goggles and report for duty. When she threw a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth amongst our Lord of the Flies wrestle one hot afternoon, we laughed when we read within the first few pages that Milo was bored. My little brother mocked in a sing-song voice, “Boredom is a choice. . ." and we all finished at a full yell “. . . .don’t make it!!” Still, we liked a good book, and so stretched ourselves out longwise on the quilt that accompanied the book and was spread under the backyard pepper tree.

To be able to read this to my reading group, as a chapter book, to kids that love to read and be read to was a delight. Milo, Tock, the Humbug and all the other whimsical characters featured travel through fantasy lands that teach them (and all readers) about the wonders of the world they have left behind. As crazy and contentious, uncooperative and unreliable as it often seems, the surprising lands they’ve been tossed into provide many opportunities to appreciate the old world order and comfort of their everyday experience.

New words, new concepts, thoughts pulled inside out, perspectives tipped upside down, there’s almost no end to the chaos that Milo and his friends need to set right before they are allowed to return home. . .to that boring old - beloved - existence.

The gang LOVED this book. It made them think and believe in their own brilliance.

5 stars. Can't top that.

A story based on puns and word play; about learning, noticing, and that wasting time is a waste of time. Very creative and imaginative, with lots of tongue-in-cheek potshots at some of the demons of existance: ignorance, boredom, misdirection… I have listened, which was a good medium for the story, but I would need to get a print copy for the quotes. The story is without Rhyme and Reason, quite literally, at least up until the end. Rhyme and Reason are princesses - which is how the story is made, making phrases literal… and Milo needs to get Rhyme and Reason back so Wisdom can once again flourish (wisdom is the kimgdom). This jumping around can get confusing, especially to conclusions.

The book is delightfully freewheeling, and even has a message: stop wasting time and start learning things, because ignorance is evil. I can get behind that.

Never read this

Is this the cleverest book of all time? I think this is the cleverest book of all time.

I so deeply enjoyed rereading this. When I was younger, I would only keep books that I would reread over and over - and I would pick up each one, seriously, an average of 4 to 6 times. I believe this absolute insanity is why I was unable to reread for the subsequent, like, 6 years. But now we're BACK. And it's been a mixed bag, but rereading this was just the greatest.

There were so many puns and allusions and metaphors I didn't understand the first (eleven) times I read it, so they made rereading this like a whole new experience. I read it in a sitting! It was such a blast.

And - it thrills me to be able to state - THAT SETTING THOUGH!!!!! God, I want to drop a visit to the Lands Beyond so badly. Don't you guys wish you could jump into books, just for a hot second? Or, at the very least, a mysterious tollbooth would be given to you to grant you passage into a mysterious kingdom filled with puns. I mean, come on.



This is only going to be a mini review because I don't even know how much I can joke about this book. I have a major soft spot for it, okay?! We all have our things.

Bottom line: Totally give this book a try. It's compelling, and clever, and short, and the characters are so cute, and the setting is so fascinating and creative and fun and amazing, and the whole thing will stick to ya like glue. I'll never be able to escape this book, and I'm not mad about it.

When I first read this in primary school, I don't suppose I noticed just how wonderful the vocabulary was, but it is, & I wish today's books weren't so diminished. That's the thing with older children's books, they stretched both mind & vocabulary, assuming you had someone to explain, or at least pass you the dictionary.

I absolutely love Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which. The adventure through this world of words & imagination is a delight, a mind expansion for any age. I think this would be great fun for an adult to read to their kids or grandkids.

Life works in such mysterious ways! There was this book that used to keep popping up as "Recommended for you" in my Amazon app. But as it was being advocated as a children's book (which I already own a ton of!) and it was a bit expensive, I was dilly-dallying about whether to buy it, in spite of the great reviews it had.

Just a few weeks of indecision later, I was conducting my usual inspection of the local secondhand bookshop and its treasures, when suddenly, my eyes landed on this very book that Amazon was convincing me to buy! Obviously, the price was just peanuts. So I just threw my uncertainty away and bought it.

Today, I am so tremendously happy that I followed my heart. Though "The Phantom Tollbooth" is a children's fantasy adventure novel, it is so fabulously written that every adult who is a child at heart will be able to enjoy this.

Choc-a-bloc with fantastically ridiculous characters & places with the silliest possible and yet totally apt names, the book keeps you on your toes, your mind constantly active looking for the myriad metaphors and subtle life lessons being imparted in so jesting a manner. The book is thoroughly humorous and very intelligently written; you keep admiring the author's imagination and grasp of the language.

Although the book would be a great read-aloud to children aged 8 and above, the vocabulary is really extensive, plus a lot of the intelligent humour would be lost on this age group. So I'd say, great independent read for ages 11 plus (with no upper age limit. Every logophile will love this book!)

Of course, the biggest joke was on me. I assumed this to be the work of a new author as I had heard neither of the book nor of the author, Norton Juster, prior to the Amazon push notification. Turns out that the book was first published in 1961! It's sad how some classics simply pass by you without your being aware of their existence.




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Norton Juster lived around the block from me when I was a kid. We all steered clear of his house because our parents told us he was a miserable bastard.

That's not true; when I asked my mom about it last year she was horrified. She said he was a really nice man and she has no idea where I got that terrible but clear memory.

Anyway, I read this like fifty times when I was a kid and is there an Italo Calvino fan in the world who didn't start with this, the child's introduction to metafiction?

Reading "grown-up" literature is excavating the human soul, the adult soul: a mangled mess of contradictions and self-deceptions, screwy motives and the odd self-adherent logic of artistic creation. But Literature (capital ell) is a pyrrhic battle between message and evasion: one must avoid moralizing outright, must avoid overt allegory, but must never be too subtle, too veiled, lest you be resigned to snobby undergrabs and many rubbish bins. The Phantom Tollbooth is a strange beast: decidedly accessible to children, but remains lovable to adults. It's championing of the struggle against moral short-cuts, boredom, and mental waste is timeless, ageless, and remains prescient, even to me: a grown person 52 years after it's publication!

My grandmother has always said: "only boring people get bored" - I am guilty of sometimes serving this packaged wit cold when a friend laments "I'm bored!" but I think forcefully throwing this book at them would be a better remedy. What is signifed in my grandmother's aphorism is that interested people are interesting, and more importantly are never idle. My family (paternal side) is a hard-working, conservative, New Englander family: we don't watch much television, we read lots of books, we listen to NPR and read the Wall Street Journal, we somewhat self-indulgently talk about the cultural decline in literacy and how we are not a part of it. But the story of Milo is one which is both entertaining, lovable, but also cautionary. By no means is Milo a bad child, a dull idler, but rather he has not found passion yet. He is bored because his urban living, his deadening routine has stayed access to the bliss of potentiality.

n  The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.n

We are plagued, as a modern, urban society by the two-headed monster of routine. Routine comforts us, it gives us an escape into the dull and Terrible Trivium: the small tasks which comfort us and distract us from important, difficult work and choices. Our society is filled with spineless and indecisive people (the Gelatinous Giant) and those who feed us half-truths, who coddle us into a mire, into a trap (Monster of Insincerity): they are not villains, and these flaws do not define all people, but are characteristic in turn. Our weaknesses, our daemons, are our horrible defenses, our cozy citadels in the mountains of Ignorance. It is not the absence of bad habits (hours of dull television, bad reading or no reading) that marks an individual's decline, but rather the presence, the support, of our defenses. The demons of the mountains of Ignorance are impotent without our compliance, they feed on our weakness for what is easy. If we allow the glittering sovereigns of Rhyme and Reason to go fugitive in their empyrean prison, we lose our grip on true happiness, we become boring, we become easily bored.

Thankfully, there is nothing boring in The Phantom Tollbooth: its play with language is unrivaled certainly in children/young-adult literature, and rivals even the masters of play (Joyce, Nabokov, etc) in the grander schema. With a dual reverence for words and numbers, rhyme and reason, and a prevailing apotheosis of time, beyond the value of currency: something never to be wasted, Juster champions all forms of mental activity and cerebral play. I can imagine no better way to introduce a bored student, particularly one ahead of his class, to the ever-infinite vistas of imagination and invention than to hand him or her this book.

n  

“It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault."

"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

n

‘welcome to the island of conclusions!’
‘but how did we get here…?’ wondered milo.
‘you jumped, of course!’ explained canby.

i must have read this book for the first time when i was about 9 or 10 and i will forever attribute it to how my love of words, puns, and silly idioms began. its a major part of my sense of humour, one that started developing with this story. and the wordplay in this is even more enjoyable as an adult.

there are many reasons why reading childrens literature past childhood is beneficial for a reader. where i was always enamoured by milos adventures to dictionopolis and beyond, its now the meaning behind his journey that really hits home.

n  

n    ‘so many things are possible just as long as you dont know they are impossible.’n  

n

these types of messages arent always missing from adult literature, but rarely are they presented in such an innocent and hopeful way. i think its a good thing to momentarily revert back to the mindset of a child, where dreams are infinite and limits are suggestions.

↠ 5 stars

Well I've had this book up on my goodreads shelves for a long time but had no particular idea what to write about it save: Clever playful little book about a boy who drives through the phantom tollbooth of the title and winds up on a quest to rescue the Princesses Rhyme and Reason. Witty. Until this morning. First I read Lisa's review, then I went for a walk. Then a thought blown out of the bending branches of a tree fly via my ear directly into my mind, that it was curious that a freewheeling adventure starts with a tollbooth, with its associations of paying for access. Indeed our hero does have to make a token payment, but then I recalled The Talking Parcel, in which the youthful heroes travel to their adventure by train, and I believe it is the case that in the Harry Potter adventures the children also travel by train  as though Kings Cross isn't crowded enougheven at the end of Narnia it is by means of a train accident that the final characters transfer via death in life to life everlasting. It would seem crude and low even by my own  complete lack of standards to make a cultural point here about the differences between the USA and Britain in terms if individualist car driving versus collectivist sharing of train journeys  with the communion of train picnics revealed through children's writing, but today that's all I've got.