Like most people I know, the first time I ever heard of the internet meme Slender Man was a few weeks ago when the news story broke about the two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their friend to please the fictional character. The demonic Slender Man is said to be tall, thin, faceless and dressed in a black suit. Artists have rendered him in many different ways.
But today when I was looking through The Phantom Tollbooth, I was jolted by this. Remember him?
The Terrible Trivium!
“He was beautifully dressed in a dark suit with a well-pressed shirt and tie. His shoes were polished, his nails were clean, his hat was well brushed, and a white handkerchief adorned his breast pocket. But his expression was somewhat blank. In fact, it was completely blank, for he had neither eyes, nose, nor mouth.”
Athough Tollbooth is not a scary book by any stretch of the imagination, this guy haunted me for years. And I wonder if Jules Feiffer’s drawing was the image my mind subconsciously triggered when I first heard about Slender Man. Is it just me?
[If this post is leaving a grim taste in your mouth, I apologize. Here’s a more pleasant Phantom Tollbooth-related realization to linger on.]
When we first meet the plucky orphans, all they have to eat are a couple of loaves of bread. But as their fortunes improve, they go from eating just bread, to bread and milk, to bread, milk, “fine yellow cheese” and wild blueberries. Each humble new addition to their pantry is an occasion for celebration. And when scrappy 12-year-old chef Jessie manages to cook a stew from some scrounged up carrots, onions and turnips and a piece of dried meat, it signifies that the boxcar has become a true home.
These days a lot of people will tell you that that dairy (like wheat) is the devil. But Heidi seems awfully healthy. The only food her iracible, goat-herding grandfather seems to feed her is bread with toasted cheese, but it’s magical stuff.
To this day anything I know about gefilte fish, hamentashen or teiglach I learned not from my Jewish in-laws but from author Sydney Taylor. It’s hard to choose just one food moment from this series, as all five of the All-of-a-Kind Family books are filled with mouthwatering descriptions of meals. But the first book has a vivid chapter where Mama takes the girls food shopping at the Rivington Street market. The road is choked with pushcart peddlers and “the delicious odor of sour pickles mingled with the smell of sauerkraut and pickled tomatoes and watermelon rind.” Each girl gets to spend a penny on a treat; Sarah chooses the roasted chickpeas:
My brother and I were obsessed with The Great Brain series, which was set in a small town in Utah in the 1890s. All that mysterious tension between the Gentiles vs the Mormons and the boys constantly telling each other “I’ll whip you good!” (these kids were always beating each other to a pulp) was utterly fascinating. I was also struck by how simple yet delicious all the food always sounded. Mamma was always cooking and baking, and the three boys were constantly “gorging themselves” on fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and pie. But this description of the toasted bread, butter and sugar was the ultimate:
That enchanted Turkish Delight (“each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious”) is what sets the plot in action. But it’s the earthy, peasant-y feast of fresh trout and boiled potatoes served by the Beavers that is the book’s crowning food moment. Mr. Beaver cuts a hole in the ice, whisks out some still-wriggling trout, and then brings it inside to Mrs. Beaver:
In my daughter’s third-grade class this spring, Friday mornings were devoted to the study of Human Growth and Development, a.k.a. sex ed. As a warm-up to each week’s discussion, her teachers would haul out a huge pile of books about sex and puberty — several of them with detailed anatomical drawings — and let the kids dive in during morning arrival. You have NEVER seen such focused eight and nine year olds; on these days, instead of idly chatting by their cubbies the kids would scramble into the meeting area and gather around the volumes like a pack of hungry animals. There they’d huddle in groups, goggle-eyed and totally silent save for the occasional chorus of “Gr-ooosss!” (And then we parents doing the drop-off would look at each other and mouth “Oh … my … god.”)
Instead of a typical textbook, the class used 
This book, translated from the Japanese, will remind you of those modern Japanese classics, Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi and The Gas We Pass by Shinta Cho (all part of the same series, My Body Science). Like those books, the illustrations here have a charming, primitive quality and the text — what little there is of it — doesn’t shy from a deadpan joke or two.
If I had grown up in a less Puritanical household, this is the book that I might have read as a kid growing up in the late 70s. It was evidently a huge hit when it came out, and it’s still in print (“over 1,000,000 copies sold!”). But I never laid eyes on it until this year, when a friend told me that he and his sister had loved it as kids. The illustrations have a very groovy Schoolhouse Rock vibe. The text is chatty and matter-of-fact (sex is compared to jumping rope; an orgasm is described as a sneeze). And I love the fact that it was written by Peter Mayle, he of the ubiquitous 90s novel, A Year in Provence. 
Fascinating. Boys’ wet dreams in the 70s starred the Breck shampoo girl!
The Clifford the Big Red Dog books may be considered classics, but they’ve never done much for me. The plotlines tend toward the preachy, the illustrations are crude (what is with 
