Recently I finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth to my kids as our read aloud bedtime stories. The book was first published in New York City in 1961, and it tells about a boy Milo, Tock the watchdog and a bug Humbug’s adventure to rescue the princesses, Rhyme and Reason, to restore peace in the kingdom of Wisdom. The disarray was started by an argument between Kings in Digitopolis and Dictionopolis in the lands Beyond, “which is more important, words or numbers?”, which ended up putting Rhyme and Reason in the prison in the Castle In The Air.
My first impression with the book is that there is witty play on words. The reason why Tock is a watch dog is because there is a watch on him watchfully ticking. When Milo and Tock arrived at the word market in Dictionopolis, they met five gentlemen talking synonyms in turn, “Of course; Certainly; Precisely; Exactly; Yes”. This word market is also the place where Milo realized that “words could be so confusing”, “only when you use a lot to say a little”.
The more I read on, the more I appreciate those wisdom gems spread across the book, such as “it is all in how you look at things” and “don’t jump into conclusions”. The monsters in the book are all too real: Triple Demons of Compromise, who always settled the differences by doing what none of them really wanted; Horrible Hopping Hindsight, who invariably leaped before he looked; Overbearing Know-it-all, who was ready at a moment’s notice to offer misinformation on any subject; Gross Exaggeration, whose wicked teeth was made only to mangle the truth; and lastly the Threadbare Excuse, who looked quite harmless and friendly but, once he grabbed on, he almost never let go.
I also enjoyed how this book talks about Math concept in a very fun way. “My angles are many. My sides are not few. I’m the Dodecahedron. A Dodecahedron is a mathematical shape with twelve faces. ” “Just follow that line forever, you will find the land of Infinity.” It is interesting to see myself discussing addition, subtraction, fraction, big numbers, Infinity with my kids while reading an adventure story!
Lastly, I would like to share some quotes from the book that gives me those “Aha” moments.
If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.
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. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.
Reading Activities
- On the map have kids plot the journey by drawing dots of different colors to each location that Milo visits, and then connecting the dots. Write a brief summary for each location.
- Learn some new vocabulary and do some math(e.g., p.188).
- Find, draw and name your monsters.