Tollbooth Returns

One of the many reasons I love L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series is because it introduced to me the concept of a "kindred spirit," which has actually informed the way I see the world and the people in it. A kindred spirit is not a best friend, necessarily, or a soul mate; in fact, a kindred spirit is not by definition someone extraordinarily close or connected to you. And a person can have more than one. Sometimes, oftentimes, the people you love most are simply not kindred spirits, although you may always secretly wish they were, but the defining characteristic of a kindred spirit is the quality that either is or is not at the outset: It cannot be manufactured or eased into later on.

I have found that I meet kindred spirits in one arena or another, people who are not and will not become my closest friends for a variety of reasons but who share with me in some way a kindred spirithood. Recently, thanks to a woman I have known for years, never known well, but with whom I sensed this kindred spirithood the very first time we met, I have broken out of my comfort zones and co-founded a book group devoted solely to, and made up of aficionados of, children's literature, affectionately called kid lit.

This is an odd thing for a group of men and women ranging from their late thirties to mid-forties to do. I recognize this, and I also know that most people--even some kindred spirits of mine--would have no interest in belonging to such a group. However, a small faction of kindred spirits, people who are all too familiar with the concept of a kindred spirit thanks to their own familiarity with Anne-with-an-e and her cohorts, feels the same way about this group that I do now: that one of the best parts of their childhood has been welcomed into their adulthood by and with people who totally understand.

Our first book was Anne, appropriately, and to be able to have a serious conversation about such a formative book for me was satisfying, to say the least. I have read Anne, and other Montgomery books, in recent years many times, so the reading of it was not a fresh experience for me. But now we are reading The Phantom Tollbooth, and I feel like I just ran into my ten-year-old self on the street. The recognition and the wave of intimacy are so intense when I open this book that today, on the subway, I kept looking up to see if anyone was noticing the way I felt, if my feelings were somehow making themselves manifest on my face.

But no. I was just another woman reading on the subway. Nobody seemed to notice I was reading a "children's book," although the very best children's books are so superior to most of the adult books available these days that I wish the genre didn't require defining. As I did when I was a child, I kept folding over corners of the bottom pages whenever I found a passage I wished to reread. Here is one, that I think is the best advice on writing I have come across in quite some time. I wish all writers would post this at their desks. Books would be the better for it. As follows:

"...today people use as many words as they can and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many."

This is not the best thing about The Phantom Tollbooth. It would not even make the top hundred. Have you read it? Have you read it in the last thirty years? Might be time to think about that dog with the clock for a body all over again.