My mother got this for us when I was 8 and it was first published in 1961. I still own that original edtion and it is not in great shape due to multiple readings. This is as much an adult as a children's book. Although I loved the story right away, it was more meaningful as I got older and I understood all the plays on words and deeper messages. Still worth rereading every decade or so as an adult, and it remains one of my favorite books. It's a very witty book. I'm a sucker for maps, however basic, and there is a map (of the pretend world written about) in the inside covers of the book. A very good fantasy with a very real heart.

My copy of this book is so old — there’s no bar code, and at the top it says 95¢. This is one of the books that my dad read to me when I was little. A lot of the puns went over my head, but I loved the world and the goofy characters, and I’d stare at the map for a long time. By now I’ve read it quite a few times but almost seem to notice something new.

The whole book is a play on words with lots of idioms expressed literally:

“I didn’t know that I was going to have to eat my words,” objected Milo.
“Of course, of course, everyone here does,” the king grunted. “You should have made a tastier speech.”

“How are you going to make it move? It doesn’t have a —”
“Be very quiet,” advised the duke, “for it goes without saying.”




There is still a plot, though, and a quest and dangerous demons and so on. The story is a celebration of knowledge and using information wisely. I don’t think the book translates well into other languages with all the plays on words. There are a number of idioms that have fallen out of use as well, sadly.

Book Blog

Up there in the ranks of all time great kids books

"RESULTS ARE NOT GUARANTEED, BUT IF NOT PERFECTLY SATISFIED, YOUR WASTED TIME WILL BE REFUNDED."

That is the promise the boy Milo receives when he embarks on a hilarious adventure to rescue two princesses named Rhyme and Reason in a fantasy land beyond the Phantom Tollbooth, which he explores with a colourful bunch of characters. At the beginning of the story, Milo is a bored young man who does not care much for anything, and can't see any point in learning, discarding knowledge and understanding as quite useless.

During his journey into increasingly absurd adventures, however, he slowly but steadily sharpens his mind and wit, and starts thinking for himself, reflecting on different perspectives of reality. The biggest midget in the world happens to be the smallest giant in the world at the same time, and Milo would not have thought of either title for the man who appears absolutely average to him. In Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, he learns about the peculiarities of language and maths, and about the complexity of thought that is the basis for our means of communication.



In the end, when Milo has developed into a curious, mature boy who cherishes the adventure of learning, he receives a final lesson from all the crazy characters in the story:

“As the cheering continued, Rhyme leaned forward and touched Milo gently on the shoulder.
"They're cheering for you," she said with a smile.
"But I could never have done it," he objected, "without everyone else's help."
"That may be true," said Reason gravely, "but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you *will* do."
"That's why," said Azaz, "there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn't discuss until you returned.
"I remember," said Milo eagerly. "Tell me now."
"It was impossible," said the king, looking at the Mathemagician.
"Completely impossible," said the Mathemagician, looking at the king.
"Do you mean----" said the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint.
"Yes, indeed," they repeated together; "but if we'd told you then, you might not have gone---and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."
And for the remainder of the ride Milo didn't utter a sound.”

I read this book aloud to a Grade 7 a couple of years ago, and later, when they were in Grade 9, they told me it was still their favourite book, and one they would never have read through or understood without the joint effort of the class, as it is a story requiring a high level of language skills as well as general understanding of how to motivate learning and generate curiosity. Just like Milo in the story, some students might have given up in the middle if they had not shared and cheered each other on. It is not a simple mainstream, straightforward plot.

One of the completely impossible tasks in the book was described by the author in an afterword. He had had a conflict with his illustrator who refused to draw a required situation in the book. He claimed it to be impossible. The drawing was supposed to show the following: "Three demons, one tall and thin, the second short and fat, and the third exactly the same as the other two!"

My students and I gave ourselves the task to create the drawing, and there were as many different results as there were participants in the activity. But we solved it: "I'm possible", we wrote underneath.

It is one of my favourite memories of reading with students, and I highly recommend the book to grown-ups and children alike: if you are not satisfied, after all, wasted time will be refunded!

I just finished this book with my oldest boy. I've been reading a chapter or two out loud to him every night when we can manage it.

I never read The Phantom Tollbooth before, so it had no particular nostalgic appeal to me. But I'd heard about it, and it was in my house (somehow) so I decided to give it a try.

Here's the short version: Meh.

It's not awful. But it wasn't great, either.

Overall, I found reading it to be a bit of a slog. When thinking ahead to reading time at night, I want to be excited. It's special time with my boy. But instead when I thought about this book, I mostly wanted to get through with it I could start reading a different, more engaging, book together with my boy.

Here's the long version:

Irritations:

1. No plot or tension.

I'm fairly sure the formal term for a book like this is a picaresque. It's mostly just a series of adventures and visits to interesting places. There's not much of a plot.

And before you get all impressed that I know that term, I'd like to mention that I only learned it in 2010 by listening to an interview with Neil Gaiman where he was discussing American Gods. I remember thinking, "Huh, apparently I've written a picaresque. I wish I'd known that about 10 years ago…."

Here's the thing, while plot isn't the focus of a picaresque, you can still tell an engaging story. There's plenty of tension in American Gods. There's a mystery and action and questions that need answering. "What's up with Wednesday?" "What's going on with Shadow's wife?" "What's happening in this small Midwestern town?" And there is the overarching story arc about the war between the new gods and the old gods.

My point is, there's a lot of things going on in American Gods. Many things to make you curious. Many things to pull you into the story in addition to the interesting people and places that we meet through the course of the story.

Phantom tollbooth doesn't have that. It's the story of a boy who goes places and stares around in amazement as things happen around him. He and his companions (for the most part) don't do anything. They're reactive, not active, and they're not particularly clever… Which leads to my next gripe…

2. The characters aren't that interesting.

If your main character's motivation is that he's bored… well… that's not really edge-of-the-seat material is it?

Don't get me wrong. I don't need an apocalypse. I don't need something to blow up. But we need *something* to provide excitement in the story. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books were fucking gripping. There were snowstorms and locusts and fucking bears. Just getting water or going to town was an adventure in those books.

Charlie and the Chocolate factory is a picaresque too, of a sort. Every different piece of the factory is like a separate land and adventure. But Charlie is *interesting.* And Wonka is doubly so. The grampa and all the other kids might be fairly simple characters, but they all have personalities.

I just wasn't feeling the same way about the people in this book. Most of them were just some clothes loosely draped around rather thin jokes.

3. It's Chaffy.

There's a lot of what I consider "Junk Dialogue" in this book. People talking without saying anything purposeful. People arguing about nothing in particular. People repeating themselves. And a *lot* more description than I was particularly interested in.

I know it might seem hypocritical for someone who wrote a 400,000 word novel to bitch about another author's economy of phrase. But the truth is, I make sure every scene and sub-scene in my books accomplish at least three productive things, more if I can manage it.

And let me tell you, when you're reading a book out loud, you can tell when it's full of pointless description and dialogue. When you're reading to yourself you can skim without hardly realizing it. Not so when you're reading aloud to a child.

Enjoyments:

1. I got to experience Oot's first pun. I think it was witch/which. I got to see the light go on in his head when he understood the joke. That's worth a lot.

(No. Wait. It was the Watchdog. He's a dog with a clock in his body.)

He also enjoyed the fact that the Watchdog could fly a little because of the expression "time flies."

That said, he didn't get about 85% of the jokes in the book. They were just too abstract language-wise.

2. Some of the concepts were fun and clever.

I'm willing to admit that Oot is simply too young for this book. There were jokes about multiplication in there. And jokes about turns of phrase that he didn't know. And puns about expressions he'd never heard.

But I don't think it's entirely fair to blame it on his age. There was a demon in there called a Dilemma that chased people and tried to gore them on its horns. You could easily be in your twenties and not know the expression, "on the horns of a Dilemma."

3. My boy liked it well enough.

When I asked him, he said he liked it. What's more, he remember the events and the characters better than I did.

That said, he never came up to me holding the book and said, "Let's read some more!" Like he did with Spiderwick, the Hobbit, or many others. So this probably counts as a pretty lukewarm endorsement from him as well.

So… yeah. Didn't love it. Didn't hate it. The sum total probably comes down slightly on the irritated side of indifferent.

My advice? This is a book that your kid probably needs to be 10 to really enjoy, as it's got a lot of wordplay in it. And honestly, 12 might be better.

Even so, I can think of a lot of books that are much more enjoyable with a lot less effort.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
Milo is a boy bored by the world around him; every activity seems a waste of time. He arrives home from another boring day at school to find a mysterious package. ... The Phantom Tollbooth is a children's fantasy adventure novel written by Norton Juster with illustrations by Jules Feiffer, published in 1961 by Random House (USA).

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1999 میلادی
عنوان: ب‍اج‍ه‌ ع‍وارض‌ ش‍ه‍ر خ‍ی‍ال‍ی‌؛ نویسنده: ن‍رت‍ن‌ (نورتون) ج‍اس‍ت‍ر؛ مت‍رج‍م: ش‍ه‍لا طه‍م‍اس‍ب‍ی‌؛ ن‍ق‍اش‍ی‌: ج‍ول‍ز ف‍ی‍ف‍ر؛ ت‍ه‍ران‌: ن‍ش‍ر چ‍ش‍م‍ه‌، ک‍ت‍اب‌ ون‍وش‍ه‌، 1377؛ در 248 ص؛ شابک: 9646194699؛ موضوع: داستانهای نوجوانان از نویندگان ایالات متحده امریکا - سده 20 م

میلو، پسری بی حوصله و افسرده است که بسیاری از کارهایش، همانند مدرسه رفتن، انجام تکالیف و نظایر آن را بیهوده می‌پندارد. او یک روز هنگامی که وارد اتاقش شد بسته مرموزی دید که... ا. شربیانی

Books only make me laugh when they are very silly. I have the impression that it's difficult to find them. The Phantom Tollbooth is one exception. I read it at the beginning of this year. It clearly was the craziest and funniest thing I've read in a while.

The style reminded me a lot of Alice in Wonderland: both books have a similar structure and use a lot of puns. Hearing this, one might thing that The Phantom Tollbooth is a copy of Alice. But even though there are similarities the two books a very different. I love them both and I think I can say that The Phantom Tollbooth is even a bit better than Alice.

By the way, on the cover you can see a watch-dog :)

Michael Chabon has written an introduction to a new edition of The Phantom Tollbooth, which is reprinted in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (June 2011 - you'll need a subscription to read the whole thing), and which prompted a reread.

I will uncritically and unreservedly recommend this book to everyone. It's been my experience that while no singular author or book has ever consciously "blown my mind," many have done so unconsciously, including this one. How can you not love a world where you can only get to the island of Conclusions by jumping or where cars go without saying or where the Mathemagician transports our heroes to the Mountains of Ignorance by carrying the three?

Like Milo, I can easily fall into apathy and I like to think that my various enthusiasms were sparked by his example.

An old favorite that hasn’t aged as well as I’d expected. The highlights were still pretty good, and my kid liked it and was excited to read it at night.

I read it out loud to my kid and found the story to be remarkably episodic and random. A lot of the language was clunky with a bad rhythm that made me tired. I also didn’t remember it being so much in the fairy tale genre, but it is, largely, using fairy tale logic of gifts and rules of 3 and things like that.

That said, it plays lots of fun word games (too tricky for my kid, but I liked them) and has some memorable classic monsters and magical happenings.

“Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.”

The Phantom Tollbooth offers some genuinely funny and clever writing. With some very smart wordplay and life lessons in every chapter, the book feels like a delightful read.

I read this years ago when my son was in grammar school I remember enjoying it together.

Read several times when I was the age of the target audience. Love it and recommend it to everyone I know. Nowadays, maybe only 4.5 stars. But, yeah, one of my all-time favorites. And my son's.
....
Another reread. Still getting more out of it. So full of word-play, satire, adventure... and despite being 'dense' like that it's an easy & fast read. My son saw me reading it and said 'hey, when you're done I want to read it again.' And he's 22 and in college.