Five Book Challenge discussion

I am officially one-fifth done with the challenge.

I wrote a review of the Phantom Tollbooth and afterward I started to wonder why it sounded more like an apology than a review. I realized that I was a little bit sad that there isn't an objective classification for books one reads, that is, that a book once a five, remains a five, or a book left out of a certain critical time period (like this one) can not be measured against the same criteria as others. That got me to thinking about some of the books I read during my initial flush of reading obsession. I was reading about five books a week, and they were all five stars. This was before kindles, the internet, and the fear of hoarding, back in the day when a book was a precious thing, and I considered myself lucky to get hold of one.

Yeah, a simple star rating doesn't really do it justice; you almost need a matrix, with separate dimensions for current mood, time elapsed since reading, whether you were assigned a book report on it...

As for Phantom Tollbooth, who's to say the spell has finished as soon as you close the book? I personally had to let it worm into my brain and nestle there for awhile before it all, um, finished hatching?

I've found that's happened with To Say Nothing of the Dog; I've pondered it from time to time in the months since we've read it and it has gradually risen in my esteem.

There was a symphony of colors (a sunrise, was it?) that I remember in PT as being very grand. I also liked the old fable that the witch told, how she became miserly with words and sayings such as "Brevity is the soul of wit" became replaced with shorter and shorter ones, until at last they had been reduced to "Silence is golden"

You will need to tell me the story of that initial reading streak someday :)

That's a compounding problem, too, of how a book can grow or shrink and come back to haunt you. I once read a book called At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and my feelings went from hate to love, with brief stops along confusion and slight irritation (but never indifference). Another example is the book Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I read it first when I was fairly young, and I couldn't understand why Tess

--oh wait, spoiler alert--



would kill her pretend husband. After all, she had a real husband she could go back to. But after growing up a little, and being confronted with some emotionally charged situations, I could see how that was choice that made the most sense (for Hardy to make).

As for the PB, it's really a brilliant treatise on rational thought. I loved the whole section about the Soundmaker. Now I'm already starting to wonder why I didn't give it a 5!