Learning is a world that we enter: The Phantom Tollbooth at 50

Here I make a plea:  Buy the October 17 issue of The New Yorker.  Turn to page 30, the piece titled "Broken Kingdom:  Fifty years of The Phantom Tollbooth," by Adam Gopnik. Find a nice chair. Sit. Read.

I love this story.  I love the idea of it, the execution of it, the knowing that one gains from it.  Who were these two men—Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer—who gave us this classic?  What was in their minds and hearts as they wrote and drew?  How did the book not end up on the remainder table?  What does it all mean?

You'll get answers to those questions.  You'll get Adam Gopnik himself, whom I love to read.  And in between you'll let lines like these, which should set you up in fine, fine style for this autumnal weekend:

What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason.  Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.

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The Rise of the Illustrated Young Adult Novel

I had heard so much that was so good about A Monster Calls, the Patrick Ness novel inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, that last night, when my arms were too achy to type a single letter more, I downloaded the book onto my iPad2.

Had I known that this book was so beautifully illustrated, I would have gone out to the store and bought myself a copy instead, so that I could, from time to time, look at these extraordinarily interesting, wildly textured Jim Kay drawings.  A Monster Calls would be a very different book without these images, just as Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the Ransom Riggs books enlivened by surreal old photographs, would not be the book it is had not a publishing house decided that teens, too (and the adults who inevitably read teen books) need, every now and then, to stop and see the world not through words but through images.  Maile Meloy's new historical YA book, The Apothecary, is due out soon—a book that (if the preview pages on Amazon are accurate) features some very beautiful illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.  And let's not forget The Boneshaker by Kate Milford, with its beautiful Andrea Offermann images. (And, of course, there are so many, many more.)

A Monster Calls reminds me, in so many ways, of the great Roald Dahl story The BFG.  Dahl's books, illustrated by Quentin Blake, sit beside The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer) on my shelf—books that take me back to some of my favorite mother-son reading days.  We loved the stories.  We loved the illustrations, too.  We loved the entire package.

Maybe we have Brian Selznick to thank for this return to the visual—to ageless picture books.  Maybe it was just plain time.  I only (with absolute surety) know this:  I recently completed a young adult novel amplified by (in my eyes) gorgeous illustrations. I can't wait to see where that project goes, and on what kind of journey it takes me.

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