The Phantom Tollbooth

Yeah, yeah.

We read The Phantom Tollbooth, my, to my daughter.

My daughter could read by then, she was reading her own books, but like-

Yeah

Yeah, definitely.

It was The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

My dad had had to go to America for work.

And when he came back, he brought me a book.

And it was The Phantom Tollbooth.

And...

It was the first book that I was old enough, I think, to remember reading and being completely transported to other worlds.

He punctuated this last thought with such a deep sigh that a house sparrow singing nearby stopped and rushed home to be with his family.

Using clever tales and fabulous illustrations, he explains complicated concepts like factorials and patterns and exponential growth.

If you're looking for some fun chapter books with a mathematical theme, read The Phantom Tollbooth by Jester or Homer Price by Robert McCloskey.

And your high schoolers can read two fabulous math novels.

One is Flatland by Edwin Abbott and The Number Devil, A Mathematical Adventure by Inzenberg.

Hello, Libration Nation.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is a book in which generations of readers have journeyed with Milo to the lands beyond in this beloved classic.

Enriched by Jules Feiffer's splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster's offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever.

For Milo, everything's a bore.

But so we learned like, you know, the relationship between the two of them, but about Norton Juster himself.

So he was an architect in, he was, I believe he was born in New York City and lived a lot of his life on the East Coast, had some military service, but mainly like lived in the East Coast of the U.S., And he talked a lot about in this documentary how he's always loved to play with words.

And even as a kid, the origin of the title, Phantom Tollbooth, is like two words that sound like they would never be together.

Yeah.

But the...

On the other hand, so the Phantom Tollbooth can say it's an allegory of study.

I mean, people have also been arguing that Oz is somehow satire of other things, right? Like the yellow brick road and the gold standard or like her shoes are originally silver.

I mean, when Tolkien is saying he didn't like allegory, maybe he had a point that this kind of search for meaningfulness, is perilously close to doing, again, what C.S. Lewis did in Pilgrim's Regress, which is just like allegorizing all of these intellectual questions that you have.

You know, it's like, okay, I want to write about this aspect of the subject rather than, you know, another because this is just on my mind today owing to, you know, various factors, some... pragmatic with respect to well these are the sources in front of me right now and some a little more uh pre-rational and hedonic but yeah yeah boy howdy

getting uh questions about carl over here um or what we got here comments on carl said um the running carl doll jokes are always funny hail carl Philanthropists said, did Carl Dahl write the Phantom Tollbooth? The book is lame.

What the hell is that all about?

Yeah, that's kind of a stupid book.

And it's kind of a stupid cartoon.

When I was in grade school, they'd show that all the time, like for whatever reason, like every year, at least once a year late.

And that's when they'd truck in the actual projector, you know, and like, we're watching like the Phantom Tollbooth because teachers hung over today.

You're like...

But okay, what if the emptiness you are facing isn't the lack of time or the pressure to be productive? What if you have all the time in the world and you are just completely utterly numb to it?

Oh, that specific strain of modern ennui brings us to our 10th and final doorway, Norton Juster's 1961 classic, The Phantom Tollbooth.

The classic.

Juster was writing during the rise of the American suburb and the standardization of public education, and he was deeply concerned about how the education system was failing to engage children's natural curiosity.

It's a linguistic playground.

But beneath the puns and the surreal dream logic, Juster is executing a highly sophisticated educational argument.

Milo is joined by Tock, a watchdog with a literal alarm clock embedded in his side, and the Humbug, a deeply insecure insect And as they navigate this landscape, Milo is forced to actually use his brain.

He has to engage.

Yeah, it's eight zeros after the 12 and the 5.

I'm reading The Phantom Tollbooth with my daughter right now, and, uh, it's one of my favorite books as a kid, and there's a, there's, we're in the section of the road to infinity.

And the-

[laughs]