“The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster

This is a delightful childhood classic that I completely missed in my childhood. I knew the name when I picked it up, but literally nothing else.

The main character of this book is Milo, who is bored with and uninterested in everything. (“Ennui” certainly wouldn’t have been in my vocabulary when I was the target age for this book, but it’s the right word  here.) Life takes a turn when he gets a package containing a mysterious tollbooth; when he drives his toy car through it, he finds himself in the Kingdom of Wisdom. He is quickly joined by the watchdog (a dog with a literal clock on his side) named Tock and the grouchy Humbug, as he finds himself on a quest to return the princesses Rhyme and Reason to the land, for with no Rhyme nor Reason the Kingdom is falling apart.

Along the way they get lost in The Doldrums, meet King Azaz of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician, ruler of Digitiopolis. They meet the two-foot-tall policeman Officer Shrift, the Spelling (s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g) Bee (b-e-e), Dr. Kakafonous A. Dischord and his companion the Awful DYNNE, among many others.

As you’ve probably started to guess, this book has lots of puns and wordplay. I am of the firm opinion that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love puns, and those who feel a need to pretend like they don’t for some reason I can’t fathom. All pun-lovers will love this book; all pun-haters will also love it even if they pretend not to.

And the illustrations (by Jules Feiffer) also need to be mentioned. They’re simple black-and-white line art, but they are extraordinarily evocative. They are a pure delight.

I dearly wish I had read this when I was a kid. Even more, I wish my mom or dad had read it to me, as the wordplay would have been on a whole other level when read aloud (“I'm the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.”)

A deserved classic.