I'm torn. Torn because I always find it hard to rate children's books and torn because while this started out SO WELL it got a little bit too nonsensical for my liking.

The Phantom Tollbooth starts out as a delightful cross between Dr. Suess and Lemony Snicket, but quickly makes its way towards Alice in Wonderland territory where all the characters speak in riddles and become increasingly maddening until nobody is making any sense at all and the idea of moving forward seems almost hopeless.

It's definitely a very clever book and the characters are very endearing (despite being so annoying), but the numerous puns and allegories become a bit tedious after a while, and I have to admit that when the journey was over I was probably just as exhausted as Milo.

Finished. Well, Juster is an interesting author and pokes fun at many things in our society which need to be poked. I appreciated the book much more this time, thanks to this annotated edition. When I tried to read The Phantom Tollbooth a few years back I didn’t get the humor and it was only that its reputation as a ‘classic’ made me give it another chance.

I figured it was too geeky for strait-laced me, or I was too dense, or serious or something, but I thought this (or a “The Phantom Tollbooth for Dummies” if one existed) might help. And it does. It’s an unwieldy read—square, large and heavy—but worth it as I’ve learned where the author was coming from on many (but not all) of his perspectives, characters and vignettes as well as the backstories on most of the illustrations. There is also some biographical information and photographs of both Norton Juster, the author and Jules Feiffer, the illustrator.

What initially put me off the book last time, the main character, Milo’s lack of interest in anything, was also what frustrated Juster enough to write the book and is resolved by the book’s end.

I still disagree (as I did during my first partial read) that all the world’s woes can be solved by the beautiful women, Rhyme and Reason—which is what Juster seems to imply. His blatant omission of God is grievous so I cannot give the book 5 stars, but I do appreciate many things the book points out about the problems in our world as well as the importance of the good things, such as Wisdom, reading, inventing, music, philosophy and the recognition that there is so much to see and do, no one should EVER be bored. However, we cannot overcome the demons Juster labels and describes so monstrously without Divine help.

I somehow missed reading The Phantom Tollbooth as a kid (or if I did read it, I've completely forgotten it!), which is a bit of a shame, because I think I would have enjoyed it!

Filled with wordplay and silliness, this is a great option for new middle grade readers (and, you know, those who are fans of "dad" jokes).

Norton Juster's 1960's classic, The Phantom Tollbooth is an all-time favorite of mine. It is a gem -- a book for the ages, all of them. It is chock full of wisdom. Every time you read it, you find something meaningful. Sadly, I think the annotated version detracted from the magic of the book, which is an allegory. I had to read each chapter in full, and then go back to read the annotations so as to follow Milo's adventures.

The few annotations I liked by Leonard Marcus were those regarding synesthesia and how Norton Juster himself was able to get over his own troubles with numbers by association with colors, how the wonderful chapter entitled Colorful Symphony was almost deleted by the editor, how colors were an important element of psychedelic rock in the late 1960s, Juster's decision not to include the Chocolate Mouse, and how many readers were upset that the Mathemagician's letter to his brother, King Azaz, all in numbers was not written in code. Hopefully, I have spoiled this version so all of you can read the original version, which is a fantastic 5 star read, which I recommend without reservation. Jules Feiffer's classic illustrations have withstood the test of time too.

Here are my two favorite quotes in this reading:

"For always remember, that while it is wrong to use too few [words], it is often far worse to use too many."

"For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reason than you do for being right for the wrong reason."

I was also amused again by the cure for jumping to conclusions was a swim back through the sea of knowledge.

Someone in a review said “The Phantom Tollbooth” was their first favorite book. Oh, how I wish I could make that claim [mine was “The Story of Babar”].

I didn’t start “really” reading until I was late into my teens; and so, with a few exceptions like E. B. White and Beverly Cleary, I didn’t read children’s literature – nothing in the independent readers or young adult genres. A few months ago I resolved to remedy that sad fact by reading those books I skipped while growing up.

What a treasure I’ve discovered. Thus far I’ve read eight or nine books by Roald Dahl (now one of my very favorite authors), plus “Peter Pan,” “The Children of Green Knowe,” “Mary Poppins,” “The Borrowers,” “A Bear Called Paddington,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the lovely and bucolic “Wind in the Willows” and “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (a true masterpiece on many levels).

Of all I’ve read Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” has had the most profound effect. Over the decades it has been favorably compared to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” However, the work it most closely resembles is L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Like Dorothy, Milo in “Tollbooth” is a child removed from the boredom of everyday life and transported to a magical land full of wonders, mysteries and dangers. On his trek to find his way home he meets a score of memorable characters – most notably the clock dog Tock. Milo and Dorothy are cousins of a sort; they both discover that there’s no place like home and that home is a place filled with wonders and magic if only you open yourself up to experience them.

Claims have been made that Juster’s wordplay and puns are too advanced for younger readers. So what? George Bernard Shaw once said: “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself,” which is a tenant I hold with. This book’s sophistication simply enhances its multigenerational appeal (not unlike all those Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies with classical and pop culture references only adults understood). “Tollbooth” was pure pleasure to read and had me grinning like the Cheshire Cat from beginning to end.


Here is something special from The New Yorker about the books 50th anniversary http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20... enjoy.

oh man. it's like amelia badelia for halfway-grownups.

here's what i think of when i think of the phantom tollbooth:

-people trying (and failing) to feed themselves with five-foot long spoons
-people having to (but not wanting to) eat their words
-semi-philosophical ideas about time and being and the way people treat themselves and each other*


what a doozy of a book! is it enough to say that i la-la-love it? no? okay, well let me add this: i think you should read it. really.

and yes, i do mean YOU specifically. try it out and let me know what you think, please. happy reading!


*NOTE: the lazy philosopher inside me...(whom my 11th grade baruchians got to know well sometime during the outsider in america book groups unit (do you remember, 301 and 303? boal and howard s. becker and freire?))...anyway my lazy philosopher really just eats this book up, what with its silly notions and its serious (?) undertones. at least i think there were some serious undertones when i last read the phantom tollbooth (e.g. when i was 10).

so really please do try the book! and if you love it (or hate it) please let me know, because i'm debating how soon to start rereading it. thanks in advance and enjoy!


p.s. IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: i have to say that my memories of this book are rosier than my current experiences with it--i stopped about 100 pages in. but only because i was getting a little nonplussed (if one can "get nonplussed") about where it was going, and i figured i'd rather spend my energy on a book i was really motivated to finish.

but if i ever finish it, i'll add a p.p.s. to tell you all about how that went for me.

Okay, so . . . I'm just going to say this right off.

I LOVE THIS BOOK.

I can't promise that you'll love it, too. It's not one of those "classics" that practically everybody will love, or at least like--it's a strange, fanciful kind of tale, and I could definitely understand how many readers might find it confusing, disturbing, or just plain boring. But I read it when I was seven years old and absolutely adored it. And by that, I mean I loved it the way I haven't loved any other book before or since. This book is a part of me. I don't think I'd be the same person I am today without it.

If you know a kid who's smart but shy, who loves to read and loves to learn, and maybe feels a little "out of things" with their friends because of it--give them this book. You might just change their life.

And to anybody else who, like me, has read this book and been changed for the better by it, I'd like to say one thing:

"Many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."

You're welcome.

A classic of children's literature. I read it alongside my child when it was assigned for school. My previous direct exposure to it was strictly from the 1970 animated film version, which I would often randomly find playing on television during my own childhood. To my recollection, I never saw the start of it, so I did not know what tollbooth the title referred to. Usually, I happened to flip to it when Milo was in the Doldrums, and it was creepy with all of these slow, gloopy mud monsters. I don't know that I ever stuck around to watch the rest of it.

It's okay, it's kind of cute, kind of irritating. There's not much of a story. The purpose of it all is to have silly fun with words, expressions, and elementary concepts. The main character, Milo, doesn't have much to recommend him. He's merely a tool to bring the reader through the different lands that make up this secretly-educational world. Milo is particularly incurious. He drives his toy motorized car through a mysterious tollbooth that he finds and assembles in his bedroom, discovers that he is transported to a magical land of wonder, and all he can say is, "What nice weather it is."

If nothing else, the book might introduce children to some turns of phrase and expressions that are increasingly out of vogue, the term "dodecahedron", and what a census taker is (if they make the leap or think to ask about the meaning of "the senses taker" that Milo encounters). My kid doesn't find it especially interesting, but has enjoyed some of the humorous moments, such as when the Humbug, inundated with a complex math problem and scrambling to complete his calculations, then blurts out the random answer, "Seventeen!"

Illustrations are fine, occasionally strange. I asked myself, when Milo met the Spelling Bee, would you really call this a bee?:



We have a little hardcover edition that originated from "Middle Years Alternative School for Humanities" in Philalphia. I have no idea how or where we obtained it, but I do love when used books travel. It is slightly vandalized, but somehow this adds to its appeal, giving it a slight gothic flair:

A true child of Lewis Carroll's Alice novels, with perhaps a bit of Bunyan ancestry as well. (Writing for The New Yorker, critic Emily Maxwell observed: "As Pilgrim’s Progress is concerned with the awakening of the sluggardly spirit, The Phantom Tollbooth is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind.")

Adventures which rescue a child from boredom are a dime a dozen, but driving a story with astonishing wordplay and logical charm is really hard: almost nobody other than Juster and Carroll has managed it. Here, Juster sets an absurdly world-weary boy the task of reuniting a pair of sundered squabbling kingdoms - one devoted to math, the other to language - by rescuing the exiled princesses Rhyme and Reason. (It's pretty easy to read the math/language divide as primary-school stand-ins for the still-ongoing false dichotomy of "Humanities vs. STEM" education).

I would give The Phantom Tollbooth five stars - it's worth that, easily - except for a minor point: I don't understand Juster's inclusion of a dreadful demon of pointless, monotonous tasks named the Terrible Trivium. Trivium is shorthand for three of the seven core subjects in classical education theory: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And the whole book is devoted, not merely to illustrating these subjects' importance, but to awakening incurious minds to the wonders of the world by making good use of them. In a book where the author is so careful about his symbolism and humorous details, this monster's name feels jarringly out of place.

But that's just one episode in a fantastic story. The writing is great, the illustrations fun, the story engaging enough to pull you along and make you laugh, and the themes are a positive influence on the world: pretty much perfect.

I don't remember much about this book, except that I loved it to pieces, and that the subtraction stew always made me really hungry.

"In this box are all the words I know," he said. "Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places."

"And remember also," added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, "that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."


When I started to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth a few weeks ago, I was very excited, but I was also a little bit nervous. I have a special, uncritical reverence for this book, the sort that you can only really have for books you read when you were very young. I remember every picture in this book, and I remember it being filled with words and numbers and quite a lot of joy. It was lovely. I was afraid that a re-read as an adult would leave me feeling as if it wasn't as good as I remembered (or, maybe worse, that I've just grown up into a grumpy cynic).

But instead I was greeted with the pleasant surprise that The Phantom Tollbooth is still wonderful, and - without me realizing it, really - I think it had a huge determining course on who I wound up being as a person. I can't tell you how many times I came across sections that I probably didn't even entirely understand the first time through, but which are now really central and important to me. The second quote up there is pretty much a longer version of one of my absolute favorite quotes as an adult.

The Phantom Tollbooth is funny and sad and hopeful. There are loads of puns that should be kind of dumb, but instead are endearing and fun. It's full of reverence for words and their potential power, and its just imbued all the way through with a wonder for absolutely everything in the world. Go read it! It's the best.

05/2012

This is a 5 star book, all the way. But honestly, as a person in my 30s, it bored me just a little bit, so I gave it 4. It was so much more intellectually challenging when I was nine. I now see this was the big influence for Lemony Snickets.