The Phantom Tollbooth

     Since the sixth grade, I have devoured Norton Juster's fictional delicacy entitled The Phantom Tollbooth every year. Before I discovered this treasure, I enjoyed reading and participating in my favorite subject area,  language arts. However, the alternate reality, prose, and creative wit of Juster's novel completely altered the way I thought about writing and speaking.  I embarked on a journey with the novel's protagonist, Milo, and encountered a world where characters could taste letters, where puns gave old words new meanings, and where five statesmen simultaneously spoke with synonyms. I had never considered language to be slippery, playful or tricky. However, this novel presented it as a game---something not only to be mastered, but to also be experienced, altered and expanded. Reading it made me desire to create sentences, stanzas or stories that readers want to lick off the page, to taste and to relish.