Every year around Christmas I habitually re-read a beloved childhood classic that survived my move across the Atlantic. While my reasons for this are tactical and pragmatic—these are very easy reads to squeeze in at the end of the year if I’m behind on my book count goals—it’s also a nice bit of cozy comfort reading that’s appropriate for the season.
This year it was The Phantom Tollbooth, which I read in ebook form on my flight to the US. There is something about ebooks that ruins the magic of these kinds of books, I have to say. It’s harder to appreciate Jules Feiffer’s charming illustrations when you’re staring at them on a tiny smartphone screen, never mind the tactile loss of the feeling of the edges of the pages against your fingers as you turn them.
Which reminds me of a point Maryanne Wolf made in either Reader, Come Home or Proust and the Squid: everyone of a certain age right now, or at any given moment in time, had access to similar levels of technology. Everyone my age, definitely everyone older and certainly some of the ones who are younger, learned to read from books because there were no tablets or smartphones or ereaders. That’s the experience built into our learning brain. Maybe generations who grow up learning to read on those devices will have the same emotional association with reading on them that we have with reading books? So much depends on what the young, growing brain is exposed to, after all.
That’s a post for another day, though!
Otherwise everything else was just as magical since the last time I read it. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the few books I would actually bother to reread, I enjoyed it so much. But even so it had been several years, making this my first reread as an adult. Exactly the kind of comfort food you need in these deeply and unpleasantly weird times.
