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 th...

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. After a long time, this is the first children book I've read. It's a good book. I read this book because of its amazing cover. And the fact that it's my cousin's course book. She lent it to me and I read it in three sittings. And loved it!It's the story of a bored child, Milo who doesn't find anything interesting in the real world. One day he gets Phantom Tollbooth as present which allows him to go to the ...

JULYas part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.fingers crossed.so: first things first. in answer to the question 'does this book hold up?' here’s what’s weird. i have no memory of reading this book as a kid. i know i read it - i remember all of jules feiffer’s illustrations and i have st...

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 exci...

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 ...

I am a reader, and I measure my life in books, and the ones that I read in my very early years were probably the most formative. You can learn a lot about a person by what their childhood was like- whether they played outside all the time or preferred to stay indoors, whether they read or didn't, whether they drew or played sports or learned instruments and languages.I, for one, loved words. I read many books with large words in them, and so I was always asking my mother what they meant, or look...

‘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...

I wasn't as impressed with this book as many of my friends. Perhaps that is because of my high expectations for the book or perhaps because of my preferences in writing style. So those who love this book can use one of those two reasons to blow off my review. However, the fact remains that I was not very interested from page to page, and if not for a commitment to a book group, I am afraid I would not have had any desire to finish it.In style the book seems to be written for a particular age gro...

Anyone who has a passion for words and wordplay will enjoy reading The Phantom Tollbooth. In this charming children's book, author Norton Juster takes us on an adventure with his main character Milo, a young boy who enters a chaotic place called the Kingdom of Wisdom and finds that to restore order in the kingdom, he must save the banished princesses Rhyme and Reason.When the story begins, Milo gets home one afternoon expecting to go through the same humdrum after-school routine he always goes t...

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 ba...