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| Creative Commons License 2.0, by Philip Halling |
I was hunched over on my knees, stretching my arm as far as it would go under the metal frame of the bunk bed. I had worked up a steady rhythm of pulling out wrinkled book reports from third grade, discarded Legos and ancient doodles I had done on notebook paper. Then, suddenly, my exploring fingers found a book -- a tattered old thing, decades old; the pages were yellow and the cheap, silvery cover was hanging off by a couple threads. "The Phantom Tollbooth," it read. I flipped open to a random page.
There I came across a boy named Milo, who was conversing with a Spelling Bee -- a huge, talking bee that spelled words as he said them -- in the middle of a market where words were sold. I was hooked. I could not put that book down until I had read until the very end, even though I hadn't even read the beginning yet.
