Nullary Sources

Michael Chabon:

To this day when I happen to write those or any other of the words that I remember having first seen in The Phantom Tollbooth, I get a tiny thrill of nostalgia and affection for the wonderful book, and for its author, and for myself when young, and for the world I then lived in.

It is truly difficult to sum up how I feel¹ about this wonderful book and its equally wonderful movie adaptation — but I do know that The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the books that taught me to enjoy not just the events the book was relating (I read more than my share of Boxcar Children and Beverly Cleary books) but to enjoy the book-as-artifact: the words of a book could be just as powerful and as enjoyable and as funny as the story.

It is truly a book that, as Chabon so delightfully describes, can (and did, at least for me) initiate a life-long love of the English language. For me, that love continued on not just with similarly pun-ish books like the Wayside School series but also in igniting a thirst for similarly mind-expanding words and constructs, which lead me to strive to read far above my school-prescribed reading level. Like the time, at age 11, when I read through Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama books without really quite understanding what was going on; or trying desperately, at age 8, to read The Fellowship of the Ring — The Hobbit being another dog-eared classic — but being unable to get through the difficult and downright scary bits at the beginning; or when I and my elementary school cohorts (‘Ili included) attempted to read the entirety of such classic texts of English literature such as:

• The Guinness Book of World Records (Updated 1993 Edition)
• Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension
• The Dictionary: An Unspecified Edition That Somehow I Can Clearly Describe: A Paperback, It Has a Blue Marble Cover, Similar to a Composition Book, but with an Oval White Cutout Which Contains the Name of the Edition — Perhaps It’s for Students? — and the Only Other Salient Detail I Remember Aside From the Way Its Pages Felt, Like a Rough Cloth That Gripped Your Fingers in a Pleasing Way and Also Felt So Satisfying to Mark Underlines on with a No. 2 Pencil, Is That the Spine Curved Inwards Horribly, That Is to Say in a Concave Manner, Which Made It Very Difficult to Get It to Stay Open to the Correct Page (Boy Am I Glad I Never Have to Use a Dictionary Again)