Books I felt I ought to have liked but really didn’t: The Phantom Tollbooth

Everybody loves THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH. It is many of my friends’ absolute all-time favorite kids book. I know I read it as a kid. I know I didn’t like it. I know I didn’t read it again. And that’s all I remember, and somehow even though everyone was always saying how much they loved it, I never picked it up again until now. Anyway, that’s the back story.

My feeling on recent reading is this: good book, but I totally can see why it hit wrong with me as a kid. Because the number one adjective I want to use for THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH is clever. Its incredibly clever. Its witty. The wordplay and puns are great, and I’m sure I would have picked up on them and enjoyed them back then as well.* But clever and witty alone does not a great book make. And that I think is my problem with this one. I did enjoy it. But I wasn’t really engrossed at all – there’s very little character-building, the characters are all kind of purposefully caricatures, and even when feelings or reactions by people were described, they were just kind of stated very matter of fact. I never actually found myself identifying with anyone. And while the constant humor kept the story from feeling like there was too much moralizing, it was nevertheless very clear that at each place, and with each character, a not-so-subtle point was being made about modern life, the way people behave, etc; to the point where those points felt in and of themselves to be the purpose of the story. Again, not something that really draws you (or at least me) in.

My other issue was that even plot-wise, the story kind of reads like a litany of “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” Not much variety in pacing, and no time spent once the “point” of each episode had taken place – just “ok, that happened, next.” I’m being a little more negative than I really felt while I was reading the book – I really did enjoy it. But I can also totally see how as a kid I would have gotten bored. Puns are funny. A few pages or even a few chapters of clever wordplay and obvious-but-still-fun set-ups are fun. But a whole book of that and nothing else just isn’t enough.

Actually, now that I’m writing this and thinking it through further, I feel like a lot of the pieces of THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH would make for great picture books – short, clever, funny stories, with imaginative premises, and a lot of great illustrations already included. But a whole series of those just strung together one after another doesn’t quite do it for me. And that’s why I can’t summon the love of this book that so many folks have (although I’m glad that I now see why they do love it. Especially as so many of my friends are language-loving types), and why I probably read it once, was kind of amused and kind of bored, and was left without a strong enough impression to lead me to pick it up again.

*I was raised in a very pun-filled household. In my family, birthdays and other card-giving occasions are basically a standing competition to see who can find the card with the best pun or bad joke. There have been some real prize finds over the years.

Books I felt I ought to have liked but really didn’t: Harriet the Spy

Before picking up HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh again, I tried to remember why I didn’t like it many years ago. And all I could remember was that it gave me an uncomfortable, squirmy, unhappy sort of feeling that stemmed from reading about Harriet doing things she shouldn’t that were clearly going to cause Bad Things to happen. Now what’s odd is I wasn’t really a goody-two-shoes kid, and I liked lots of other books about characters that were naughty, or even who did things I felt they shouldn’t, who did things that I saw as hurtful, etc. So there must have been something more to it than that, but my memory consists entirely of the squirmy feeling.*

And then I opened the book, and the degree to which this is an obnoxious girl with no discernable redeeming qualities, with whom I cannot sympathize at all, and who is not even interesting to make up for it, absolutely bowled me over. Harriet’s attitude towards the people on the subway when they go to visit Ole Golly’s mother really turned me off. I began to get slightly more interested in Harriet as a character only when her spy notes began to be less observations and more musings. Like:

What is too old to have fun? You can’t be too old to spy except if you were fifty you might fall off a fire escape, but you could spy around on the ground a lot.

Harriet’s reaction to being an onion for the Christmas play went a long way towards endearing her to me as well, so by mid-book I actually cared about the main character, which is helpful. I vaguely recollect that my original reaction to Harriet’s friends reading her notebook was more on the friends’ side, but this time through I thoroughly empathized with Harriet, particularly as she goes through the subsequent days miserable and misunderstood. So from that turning point on I was properly hooked, and I really did enjoy the rest of the book, but I likely wouldn’t have gotten that far naturally (like, without being determined to finish and blog about the book).

A few other random thoughts:

• What the hell kind of a name is Ole Golly? I mean, seriously.

• I think Harriet seems like a 9 year old, not an 11 year old. The things she wonders about, her level of awareness (or lack thereof) of her friends’ and classmates’ having feelings, and just her general behavior, don’t ring true of an 11-year old for me. That made it hard for me to buy into the character; I eventually just decided that in my mind she’d be 9, and that made it all work much better.

• I suspect as a child I was confused by the progressive-type school Harriet attends, particularly as it would have seemed incongruous with the other time period cues given in terms of the parents’ behavior, etc.

• I’m not sure I find it believable that Harriet was permitted to print the newsletter items she did – but I enjoyed the twist of her not actually being reformed or learning her lesson.

*I recall a different kind of squirmy feeling from some books that I loved but that creeped me out or were deeply affecting in a way that stuck for days after reading (especially Time windows book), so that I started hesitating to re-read them, even though I loved them, because it was too big a psychological commitment. I do a similar thing with some movies now – I really want to see them, but I’m sure they’ll leave me depressed, and I’m never willing to commit to that so I keep really wanting to see them but when the time comes to actually sit down and watch something I choose fluff.

Books I felt I ought to have liked, but really didn’t: Anne of Green Gables

This is the first installment of a new series/experiment. There are plenty of books I never liked, and that’s fine, but there are a few that I felt a kind of compunction to like, and was always kind of regretful that I didn’t So, (here’s the experiment part) I’m going to read them again, and see what I think now. The thing is, once I didn’t like these books the one time I read them as a child, of course I didn’t read them again, so I have limited, vague memories of why I didn’t like them, which makes it hard to hold up my side in discussion with everyone who love love loves them.

Anyway, first up is ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L.M. Montgomery. This one is actually a slight exception to the group, because I never felt as much of a strong sense that I ought to like this book as a kid. But what’s puzzling is I loved Montgomery’s EMILY OF NEW MOON and its sequels, read them over and over again. Granted, they had the special appeal of a main character with my name, which I’m sure is what made me spot them and pull them off the shelf in the first place. Because I loved the EMILY series so much, I tried ANNE a few times over the years…and never got past the first couple of chapters, it was just too boring. So then I stopped trying it, until, as an adult, I discovered the deep love many of my friends have for the ANNE books (and movie, which I have not seen). So I gave it a shot last week, and definitely would have put it down again after a couple chapters if it hadn’t been for my determination to do this post. I will say, about half way through it got a lot more engaging, and while I don’t think I’d read it again I’m glad I got through it the once.

I think the issue is that it has a lot of what I don’t like so much in the EMILY books, but amplified, and without much of what I do like. In both, I lose patience with the endless descriptions and have to skim – I started enjoying ANNE a lot more once I started skimming. But I find the devices used in the EMILY books to express that side of the character more believable, and less inclined to take over the whole character. Anne’s defining characteristic is her imagination – she gets lost in imaginings and forgets what’s going on around her, and talks endlessly about her imaginings and observations and how beautiful various trees are. Whereas Emily gets similarly lost in her writing, which for me is more believable than a 12 year old spending hours and hours just sitting and imagining; and Emily’s endless descriptions of how beautiful something is, etc come out primarily in her writing, so they don’t dominate her interactions with people and her whole character as much.

Another key difference for me is that the other characters in the EMILY books are both more interesting and better developed than the supporting characters in ANNE OF GREEN GABLES. Emily’s friends are fully developed and have interesting and distinct personalities, whereas Anne’s friends are kind of flat and boring. And Emily’s adversaries are much more genuinely adversarial than Anne’s – there’s a clear parallel between Marilla in ANNE and Aunt Elizabeth in EMILY, but Marilla gives really only token opposition, whereas Aunt Elizabeth and Emily genuinely clash throughout much of the first book. Plus Emily has Aunt Ruth and her teacher to detest, whereas Anne has no parallel foes.

The reason I’m writing so much about the EMILY books in this post about ANNE OF GREEN GABLES is that most of my sense of ought-to-like-it for ANNE came from the fact that I loved the EMILY books. But I’ve now concluded that the EMILY books are really quite excellent, whereas ANNE is mediocre and kind of boring, so I am now content with my lack of ANNE love.

Next up in this series: Louise Fitzhugh’s HARRIET THE SPY. But maybe not for a little while, because its not the easiest thing to get yourself to sit down and read a book you think you’re not going to like, and two in a row is just too much. Besides, I have to go re-read the EMILY books now that I’ve thought so much about them.