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I recently re-read, and once again fell in love with, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.
The book is a funny, exciting, thoroughly enjoyable adventure story about the value of intellectual curiosity, and the vital importance of clear thinking.
Seriously.
One of my favorite setpieces is the moment when, driving along the coast, Milo and his two traveling companions each make an unsupported statement -- "nothing can possibly go wrong now," "we'll have plenty of time," "it couldn't be a nicer day". As each one speaks, he is ejected from the car, and lands (safely) on an island just off the shore, which we learn is called Conclusions -- you get there by jumping.
The Humbug attempts simply to jump back, but lands in the sand a few feet away -- the return trip is not so easy.
Milo and friends swim through the Sea of Knowledge to get back to their car, upon which Milo states "from now on I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions".
I read a couple of excerpts from Phantom Tollbooth in my Childcraft books - the part about the Mathemagician looking for the "biggest number" and so on - this would have been at around age 5 or so - and that was probably one of the first pushes in my life toward mathematics.
I think I read exactly the same excerpt -- that was my first contact with the novel. If memory serves it was in a world book children's set of encyclopedias, in the math volume. It was heady stuff for a seven-year-old, and I loved it.
I'm remembering a passage in Childcraft about eating soup made of negative numbers that made you hungrier.
That section comes from the part where Milo and his companions arrive in the Number Mines and are completely famished because they've been travelling all day. They eat and eat but never get full. Eventually, the Dodecahedron helpfully tells them that they've been eating Subtraction Stew because it's perfectly logical that you'd start off full and eat until you're hungry.
Ditto. Verbatim (except maybe around age 8 instead of 5).