I saw "The Phantom Tollbooth" on a list of beloved children's books, and realized I had somehow missed it when I was a kid. I listened to the audio version, narrated by actor Rainn Wilson, and thought it was delightful. The book is filled with clever wordplay and has good advice on the importance of not jumping to conclusions and watching your words (otherwise you may have to eat them!) Highly recommended.

Favorite Quotes
"Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best."

"The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between."

"You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... 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."

"You may not see it now ... but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way ... Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in the pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."

"So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."

I love (good) children's books, and this is definitely one of the best I've ever read. My only regret is that I didn't get to enjoy it as a child.

I recommend reading Mia's review, because it's a true work of art, and without it, I would have never learnt about this wonderful little book.

The Phantom Tollbooth is a delightful book full of wordplay, and what incredible wordplay at that! It is a children's book, which not just teaches about numbers and letters and words and responsibility, but I recommend it for all users, young and old. It is full of interesting, absurd, ridiculous characters like the Whether Man, the Watch Dog, kings Azaz and Mathemagician, princesses Rhyme and Reason; as well as fascinating places like the Island of Conclusions and the Valley of Silence. It is full to the brim with puns, alliterations, rhymes and such utterly clever wordplay, I probably literally squealed in delight sometimes.
Take, for instance, part of the Lethargians' schedule:
n  “From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
“From 1:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
“From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lounge until dinner.
“From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.n

On the way, Milo, the ten year old protagonist, learns many valuable lessons; such as learning to pick his words carefully before speaking, so he can make sense, and understanding the importance of mathematics in life. He also learns that most things in life are only impossible, if one perceives so. He learns about the meaning of sound, and the value of silence. Most of all, he learns to learn from his mistakes. He learns that things we see may not always be as they seem, and that it is important to understand rather than just idly see.

n  “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

I myself had so much to learn from the book, betwixt all the laughs and the amusement provided by the wordplay. Math, for instance, has always been my Achilles' heel. I also have the terrible habit of jumping to conclusions. The vivid imagery provided by this book on both these...elements kind of made me want to work on myself in these aspects. Remember that without Rhyme of Reason, a Castle of Air will always float away. Remember the importance of an Average, and the problems with Overbearing Know-it-All and Gross Exaggeration.

It's a little difficult for me to write anymore than I have, for fear of spoiling this, but I recommend it highly. Read it if you're feeling bored; read it if you're feeling low. Whether a child or an adult, you'll laugh, cry, learn, and be a little bit wiser after you're done.

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.

Up there in the ranks of all time great kids books

Never read this

I've always read ravenously, but when I was younger, I didn't really understand the idea of going out and trying to find good books to read. Instead, I'd read the handful of books I had over and over again. Not that I only had a handful. At the head of my bed, there was a compartment maybe two feet wide, one foot deep, and one and a half tall, which was always full of books.* I'd stuff it so tight some of the books would come out warped, and I vaguely remember once having trouble getting any of the books out, so snugly were they crammed. At any rate, these were the books I'd read over and over again.

I also didn't discriminate much as far as quality. Pretty much any book with lots of words was automatically good, fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, manuals for computer programs, I would seriously read anything that was in the house. (And yet I'd never read anything I was supposed to read for school, nor would I ever go to the public library, nor even Barnes and Noble, where my mother worked.)

Despite that, there were a couple books that were perennial favorites. This was one of them. I didn't really identify with Milo's nihilism, nor with Tock (although I do love automobile rides), nor with the ridiculous Humbug, but I did like them all to some degree. And some of the concepts - the dude who's the .58 in an American family's 2.58 kids, who is the only member of the family who can drive half a car; the guy who conducts the orchestra that creates color; the pleasant, urbane, demon with no face (The Terrible Trivium?) - just about short-circuited my ten-year-old brain. In a good way.

*Sometime around high school, most of that area was filled by a stereo. But I still managed to pack books in on top of it.

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.

Surprised I haven't rated this before. A big part of my childhood was reading and this book was a favorite

Everyone should read, as a fan of puns & language I loved this as a kid & loved it more when I read it again a few months ago when I found it in a box of packed books.

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.

4.5 stars

In a nutshell, this holds up really well upon reread. The wordplay is somehow even more clever than I remember, the characters are as lovable as ever, and for me the whole thing is just wrapped up in so many fond memories of reading out loud with my little brother.

-----------
n  CONVERSIONn: 13.35 / 15 = 4.5 stars

Prose: 9 / 10
Characters & Relationships: 9 / 10
Emotional Impact: 8 / 10
Development / Flow: 7 / 10
Setting: 10 / 10

Diversity & Social Themes: N/A
Intellectual Engagement: 4 / 5
Originality / Trope Execution: 5 / 5
Rereadability: 5 / 5
Memorability: 5 / 5

#2018PopsugarReadingChallenge
11. An allegory

Ban đầu tôi đã sợ quyển sách này không đúng với nội dung thử thách yêu cầu - một câu truyện ngụ ngôn - khi mà nhìn qua bìa và đọc giới thiệu tôi nghĩ ngay đến một câu truyện quá hiện đại, không giống với những câu truyện ngụ ngôn tôi từng được học trong chương trình ngữ văn ở trường. Nhưng hóa ra tôi đã nhầm to.
Tôi đã tra từ điển Oxford và đây là định nghĩa của từ allegory:
a story, play, picture, etc. in which each character or event is a symbol representing an idea or a quality, such as truth, evil, death, etc.
Và câu truyện này phù hợp. Ý tôi là hết sức phù hợp. Từng câu, từng chữ, từng nhân vật, lời nói trong câu truyện đều là phép ẩn dụ về những điều thân thuộc nhưng rất ta nghĩa trong cuộc sống như chú chó canh giữ hay chú chó thời gian Tock (watch dog) luôn canh giữ, nhắc nhở để không ai lãng phí thời gian, ý nghĩ của âm thanh, màu sắc, của những lời nói và quyết định qua người Bảo hộ âm thanh, ngài Sắc độ, ong đánh vần, vân vân... rất rất nhiều các phép ẩn dụ mà tôi không thể kể hết được, bạn chỉ có thể tự đọc, tự khám phá thôi.
Trạm thu phí quái lạ còn dày đặc các phép chơi chữ. Cứ cách vài trang tác giả lại lồng ghép khéo léo vào một phép chơi chữ của những từ đồng âm, đồng nghĩa. Lúc đọc tôi đã rất tò mò không biết bản gốc sẽ thế nào, tác giả dùng những từ ngữ gì, thật tiếc biết bao khi không được tự mình đọc bản gốc.

Nội dung câu truyện rất dễ thương về hành trình giải cứu hai cô công chúa Vần điệu và Lý tính cùng những khám phá bất ngờ và rất ngộ nghĩnh của Milo, một cậu bé ban đầu khá buồn tẻ nhưng sau chuyến đi đã trưởng thành hơn rất nhiều.
Chi tiết tôi thích nhất có lẽ là dàn nhạc của ngài Sắc độ. Một dàn nhạc không hề có âm thanh mà dàn nhạc này tạo lên những sắc màu dệt lên một buổi bình minh rất đẹp, rất huy hoàng.
Truyện còn có rất nhiều tranh minh họa rất hợp, rất đẹp. Nét vẽ của họa sĩ không hề rõ ràng, toàn bộ bức tranh là những nét vẽ rối rắm nhưng lại hết sức ngộ nghĩnh, rất hợp với nội dung câu truyện.

Trạm thu phí quái lạ khiến tôi nhớ lại một câu truyện của Việt Nam đó là Ai và Ki ở xứ sở những con số tàng hình (tôi không nhớ rõ tên truyện cho lắm) nhưng Trạm thu phí quái lạ xứng đáng ở bậc trên câu truyện kia rất nhiều, cả về nội dung và ý nghĩa.