Article We Never Finished Reading

Adam Gopnick has a piece in The New Yorker about the 50th anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth.  This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, so I wanted to see what he had to say.  It starts thus:

Our cult of decade anniversaries—the tenth of 9/11, the twentieth of “Nevermind”—are for the most part mere accidents of our fingers: because we’ve got five on each hand, we count things out in tens and hundreds. And yet the fifty-year birthday of a good children’s book marks a real passage, since it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again. A book that has crossed that three-generation barrier has a good chance at permanence. So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an “Alice in Wonderland” of its own, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters.

It's true, anniversaries are arbitrary, even pointless.  So why have a makeweight arguent to pretend the fiftieth for The Phantom Tollbooth is any different?  I know you've got to have a point of entry into your essay, but this one seems so weak that it was tough for me to continue.