When: Finished May 29, 2016
Where: AADL
Why: As the daughter of a librarian, a love of stories and books is in my blood. I recall nights of listening to my mom read the Little House on the Prairie series, and afternoons spent in the library looking for my own stories to choose, and summers spent getting stamps for each new book that I finished. Even now, I usually have at least five library books sitting on my shelf waiting to be opened to enjoy the new story as it unfolds. Sometimes, I read the latest popular books, and more often, I tend towards obscure books - because really, there are so many authors producing so many stories these days that it's hard to always find a book that someone else has enjoyed. For me, I like to read before I go to bed, so that puts a wrinkle in my selections, steering clear of anything too dark or depressing, so some of my choices are fluffy, or interesting non-fiction, or young adult books.
The Top 100 List I used to find a new book was published in 2014 when this item made its debut on that year's list of new things, and every year, I've tried to read another book from it. My conquests have included books I've read over and over again (Pride and Prejudice), a book I've read in French (The Little Prince), a book I read for the first year of this blog, and 21 others that I've enjoyed over the years.
Before
I started reading this year's choice, The Phantom Tollbooth, I imagined it was something like "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," but with a Scooby Doo twist on it to make it more
modern. I have often seen pre-teens reading this book, and have heard it as an
answer on Jeopardy more than once, so that dichotomy had me baffled, and
intrigued, so I picked it up from the library to see what was really going on betwixt the covers. Once I started reading, I couldn’t NOT see Donald in Mathmagic Land, the learning tool used to connect math to the real world for students since the 1950s. It includes a narrator helping Donald to see the importance of numbers and patterns in the world, similar to the quest the main character Milo goes on in The Phantom Tollbooth. Eventually, the story reminded me of the allegorical The Alchemist, too, altho perhaps because of it's young reader audience, The Phantom Tollbooth was written with a much heavier-hand than The Alchemist, using characters like "The Threadbare Excuse" and settings like the Land of Ignorance to drive home the message.
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