reading the phantom tollbooth
"well, i would like to make another trip," he said, jumping to his feet; "but i really don't know when i'll have the time. there's just so much to do right here."
ever since i started dm-ing and running my own campaign for my friends, i've been searching for material in everything i consume. and last year, that was not a lot of things at all. i had stopped reading any sort of books. i only ever read the same exact transmigration & reincarnation tropes over and over again (which is still very much a guilty pleasure of mine. and at some point i will write about the best ones. my favorite ones. death is the only ending for the villainness, my mom got a contract marriage, the villainess reverses the hourglass, stepmother's marchen, etc. you will forever be iconic to me.) and beyond my over 200+ revenge plot manhwa reads, i was only digesting a couple of in-season manga and watching anime with my boyfriend.
and it's not that i think those things are lacking in artistry, but it was getting excessive, and i felt like i was stagnating. in a very unsexy way. not like moss or a warm swampy pond, but more like floodwater with no where to drain. and in each of my reckless attempts at campaign-prepping, i could feel myself struggling. even if i was watching tips & tricks, reading the handbooks, and listening to so many hours of podcasts, it just wasn't working for me. i knew what i needed to do, i just had no good ideas to start with. so i kept pushing back sessions: what was originally meant to be every week, became every other, and i still didn't even follow that. my only remedy to my obscene lack of inspiration was slotting in other people's pre-made modular adventures, encounters, or dungeons and doing my best to make it relevant to what already existed. and it sucked because i think my players could kind of tell?
i'm a good dm, or so i'd like to think, and i ask my party members what they like, what they dislike, what they want to see more of, etc. much like any sort of employer-employee satisfaction survey. and more often than not, their favorite sessions were always the ones that i had made completely from scratch. but doing that was drudgery. even the 1:1 copying i was doing was drudgery. i loved playing, but i hated everything i had to do to get there. i didn't know what i wanted to do with myself, or the world i was making.
so it's been refreshing to have this book kind of break me out of that slump, and i think it's a fitting one to have done that too. it follows protagonist milo, who sees most everything as a waste of time, until he gets isekai'd and learns the value of curiosity & love of learning. which, is very preachy and is a very feel-good cheesy moral (especially since its given ala monologue at the very end). but there is just so much innate wit in the entirety of the book's world-building and wordplay, i can forgive the ending for being contrived. i was just struck by the pure joie de vivre in some of those chapters. i had so much fun reading, after so many months of not reading at all.
i also just have a bad habit of forcing myself to try and read books i do not like because i feel like i should like them but i don't. and i think that's what stumps me β i'll feel guilty for not finishing something so i stop reading all together. 2024, i will actually try not do that anymore. if i do not like it, i will honestly just put it down and not touch it again. which is also to say that it means a lot to me that this book captured my attention so much. take that as you will !!
that being said, alongside talking about myself, what i love, and what the things i love mean to me, this is also an attempt to amass an internal repertoire of those cool ideas i am so severely lacking in. so here are some moments that i loved from this book (enumerated because i don't think i have the brainpower to muster a better flow). there are lots of others not mentioned, like the spelling-bee, the humbug, alec bings, the wordsnatcher, and all the other demons from the land of ignorance. it is all very fey-wilds coded to me;
in chapter 10, milo meets chroma, the conductor of an orchestra that plays the colors of the world instead of actual music. he (unwisely) decides to lead them himself after he wakes up at 5:23am for the sunrise. β in a "symphony of color". strangely, my love for this scene is not at all about the way it's described. i just really liked that they were so specific about the time of the sunrise. it made me feel good in a way i don't think i know how to explain.
in chapter 13, milo meets a man who asks him who he (the man) is. milo asks him to describe himself, to which he says, "i'm as tall as can be, and i'm as short as can be, i'm as generous as can be, i'm as selfish as can be," and so on and so forth. milo, cleverly responds that he must be "canby"! β again, sorry, no words to explain this well. i just thought it was delightful and i smiled reading it.
in chapter 18, milo makes it to the castle in the air, but has no way of going down. but time flies, and he very conveniently has a watchdog with him. β another delight. such fun in the twisting of simple things, in unexpected perspectives even just in words; synonyms and what is literal or metaphorical.
i think the binding thread here is just that i loved how playful the book was. it helped it make such a vibrant world, not necessarily because of attention to detail or realism (obviously) but because it built off of such a unique starting point. these definitions, metaphors, and idioms, etc. are all already existing structures & it feels almost mischievous to reframe them in this way. to me, it reads like a dad joke and an accompanied facepalm. but i also feel that it holds a lot of sweet, subtle wisdoms.
it's didactic, but i think it worked? maybe i needed milo and i needed these lessons, as silly as it sounds to admit to myself. obviously the ills of my lack of creativity and originality is not curable in a single read, but i feel at least, invigorated in that effort. i think i will be buying myself a physical copy for a reread sometime in the future β thank you migmac & marco for recommending!
lines i loved: (in imitation of misha's missives from a bowl of soup; 2023 wrapped: a year in reading. i love you misha if you will ever see this).
"well", continued the watchdog impatiently, "since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking." and with that he hopped into the car.
"how can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet. "sometimes it's much simpler than seeing things that are."
"it's very much like your trying to reach infinity. you know it's there, but you just don't know whereβ but just because you can never reach it doesn't meant that it's not worth looking for."
words i loved: (words i admittedly had to look up in the dictionary) p.s. i have always been an avid consumer of middle-grade books. and while it is definitely not put down as much as young adult literature, i feel that in general, people tend to devalue anything that is made for younger audiences. and i am not exempt from this behavior; but truly i think kids do deserve good art and good fiction (bluey is a shining example). children's literature is not just simplistic or lacking in depth. it can be and should be full of this of this kind wonder!! (and whimsy, which is a very very great word.)
palatinate β a territory under the jurisdiction of a count palatine (who is, of an official or feudal lord, having authority that elsewhere belongs only to a sovereign.
quagmire β a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot, or an awkward, complex or hazardous situation.
obstinate β stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or chosen course of action, despite attempts to persuade one to do so.