Most Recent Reread: The Phantom Tollbooth

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My brother, sisters and I have started a book club.  Our first book, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, was a delight to read.  I read this book several years ago in elementary school, and had forgotten what an amazing book it was.  My favorite character is Tock, the ever vigilant watchdog.  There is something reassuring about a ticking clock for me.  I'm the opposite of Captain Hook becuase I love the sound.

I love how the author uses wordplay and idiomatic expressions!  For example, Rhyme and Reason left Wisdom, so there was discord, one must jump to the island of conclusions, and the residents of Dictionoplis must eat their words.  

I also loved the many thought provoking sentences.

"...Today people use as many words as they can and think themselves very wise for doing so.  For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many" (68).  

"...'Oh no, not in the middle of the program,' she replied, and turned the silence up a little louder" (152).  

"I suppose they are necessary, for you'd never really know how pleasant one was unless you knew how unpleasant it wasn't" (164). 

"You know that it's there, but you just don't know where--but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for" (197). 

"For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons" (233).  

"...It's not just learning things that's important.  It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters" (233).  

"As you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible" (247).

Now I just have to wait for my siblings to finish reading it.  I'm excited to see what they have to say.  Perhaps I will post more once we have discussed it.  

Works Cited

Juster, Norton, and Jules Feiffer. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Epstein & Carroll ; Distributed by Random House, 1961. Print.