Sorry, Slackers' followers. I have not been up to writing reviews of all the books that have piled up waiting to be returned to the library. Let's take them in order of preference, rather than trying to reconstruct what I read when.
I was almost grabbing absolute strangers on the street and telling them they had to read The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster. Older son hasn't (and it's almost impossible to find something he hasn't perused) but his new darling wife had it in her collection of books from school. I hope it reads it soon because this should be on every sophomore and junior high school students' summer reading list. I touted it to my new boss, left him my copy, and he ended up ordering it for his Kindle. I bought my own 50th anniversary edition.
Yes, it is marked 'juvenile" or young adult in the library stacks, but it needs a certain maturity to get all the puns. Adults reading it will be tempted to find their fellow workers and neighbors in the characters that Milo meets during his adventures in Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. The book is only 256 pages long; most pages have fabulous illustrations by Jules Feiffer (for all you youngsters, Feiffer used to draw many of the cartoons in Playboy ... you know some people really did read the magazine for other reasons). I dog-earred over 20 pages so it will be difficult to select those vignettes I loved the most, but here goes.
As the passel of reviews I am trying to post and catch up on will indicate, I have been reading more "thoughtful" books lately, either poetic (like Fleurs du Mal) or philosophical, and even a couple of almost sociological tracts, despite that course being an anathema to me in college. So within this recent context to connect themes, I loved Dictionopolis where words mean more than their placement in a sentence. Milo, lost in a place called Expectations asks the "Whether" man what kind of place it is: "Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not." (For each of the selected quotes, I will illustrate my own personal embodiment of the underlying thesis: here's the first. At work, not only are we physically moving to another location, but several people are in line for promotions. All employees are up in arms: the expect to be chosen for advancement and they expect their new office space will be better than what they've had for years. None of them regards themselves as prime movers; they expect to be taken care of, not to make their own success. Lesson One for "Everyman"Milo.) People who live in Expectations must be first cousins to the Lethargarians who live in the Doldrums.
Anyone who has had to edit office memorandum will identify with Faintly Macabre, the Which/Witch who cautions Milo: " ... people today use as many words as they cn and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often worse to use too many."
The plot, if there is one in this allegory, centers around the king of Dictionopolis, Azaz, and his counterpart in Digitopolis, the Mathemagician, and how they came to ignore the wisdom of the princesses Rhyme and Reason who opined that words and numbers were of equal value and who as a result were exiled to the Castle in the Air. While en route to rescue and release the princesses, Milo attends Azaz's banquet where the king boasts: " ... my cabinet members can do all sorts of things. The duke here can make mountains out of molehills. The minister splits hairs. The count makes hay while the sun shines. The earl leaves no stone unturned. And the undersecretary hangs by a thread." (Are all you students picking up on these no-nos as you write the essay portion of your SAT exam?)
Although in my next review I will write about the fun of tesseracting, here in TPTB, the most novel means of transportation is depicted as follows: Tock, Milo's dog asks Canby where they are: "... To be sure ... you're on the Island of Conclusions ... But how did we get here ... You jumped, of course ... That's the way most everyone gets here. It's really quite simple -- every time you decide something without having a good reason, you jump to Conclusions ... It's such an easy trip to make that I've been here hundreds of times."
Milo moves on to Digitopolis, whose exiles seem to reside on the 13th floor of a certain office building in a northeast state capital. It's inhabitants posit: "... did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail ... That's absurd ... That may be true ... but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?" Why do I spend days and days finding the answer to the wrong question?
And to give my former discipline its just definition, Juster includes the best description of budgeting that I've ever heard: "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic." And Juster also seems to know how to write up civil service job specifications: "But why do only unimportant things? ... Think of all the trouble it saves ... If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing ..." (Actually, I think I'll blow this quote up and frame it and hang it in our new office space.)
The assignment I've been working on most recently is to review interview questions that will be used when selecting a candidate for my former boss' job. Why do I presume one of them will answer like the Gelatinous Giant: "... I mean, why not leave well enough alone? That is, it'll never work. I wouldn't take the chance. In other words, let's keep things as they are -- changes are so frightening ..."
Finally, because it is budget season and the powers that be in the Legislature are negotiating as I type with the Governor's staff, let me introduce the easily recognizable Triple Demons of Compromise: "... one tall and thin, one short and fat, and the third exactly like the other two . As always, they moved in ominous circles, for if one said "here," the other said "there," and the third agreed perfectly with both of them. And since they always settled their difference by doing what none of them really wanted, they rarely got anywhere at all ..." Does anyone hear the words "dysfunctional" or "redistricting" in the wind?
This book is the penultimate "bucket" list book for 2012. How did I miss this 50 years ago? Did the nuns think it too provocative for the Feiffer cartoons? Was it perceived as too cynical? Heck no, it is the Gulliver's Travels or Alice in Wonderland of the 20th Century. Read on.
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