Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: Centenary Edition (Penguin Classics)

I enjoyed Alice In Wonderland. I found it to be inspiring and funny, with many radical ideas and colourful characters. John Tenniel's illustrations inject the story with even more life and pizzazz. However, Through The Looking Glass was overly-surreal to the point of being vague. I felt that

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Carroll had lost his way on his own journey in the story and was merely suggesting ideas, rather than writing a good yarn.

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A true classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass can be read in many ways and is always entertaining.

Well, what can be said that hasn't been said before? I approached Carroll's classic by way of Kafka and a lot of other modernist fiction, and I can see the connections hinted at by the introduction. At times, Carroll's tales are mesmerising, and I felt dizzy towards the end - perhaps more a product

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of reading so quickly. The greatest victory here is the balance of childlike wonder and adult sadness- nothing lasts, nothing makes sense, everything is transitory.

Note: This book kind of appears twice on the list of 1001 books to read before you die, but I've entered it on librarything as the combined works.

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I didn't love this, didn't hate this. I expected it to be really weird. It was strange enough but not as much as I expected it to be. Pretty much just seemed as if it were an odd sort of tale to hold the attention of some young minds, as it was I suppose. (I only read Alice's Adventures in

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Wonderland and the introduction to the tale and about the author.)

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Lewis Carroll's classic childhood tales of nonsense and wonder are presented in the Penguin Classics edition with all of the original illustrations, the original manuscript which he presented to the actual Alice Liddell, the little girl he befriended. The narratives themselves are full of wit,

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satire and utter nonsense, all helpfull puncutated with abundant footnotes to explain the historical, literary and political references to the modern lay reader without a background in English history. In addition, the introduction provides a context to understand Carroll, Alice, the stories, Oxford life and the controversy surrounding Carroll and his penchant for befriending, beguiling and photographing in the nude and near nude prepubescent girls. All of this information provides another layer to the depth of the texts themselves, giving the cynical reader an impetus to find innuendo hiding in the nonsense.

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I don't think I got it, but I've read it now, at least.

I don't think it's possible to review this book, since it's basically like reviewing a dictionary: it's just the ideas and phrases we use everyday now. Jabberwocky, 'the time has come,' down the rabbit hole, and so on. I admit there was less logic chopping than i was hoping for, and basically,

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these things are never as good on paper as they are in one's mind.

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Super strange. The more I read of this book, the more confused I got. Were we actually discussing anything worthwhile? Were we reading too much into a passage that Carroll wrote just to be nonsensical? If Alice doesn't grow at all throughout the novel, what's the point of this whole thing anyway?

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My J710 class and I could discuss rather endlessly minute parts of this book, but larger themes spanning the whole novel were more difficult for us to grasp and keep a hold of, as everything seems so up to one's own interpretation.

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I decided to download this from the Gutenberg project and read it for the 100th anniversary of its publication this year.

I'm glad I did!

I decided to download this from the Gutenberg project and read it for the 100th anniversary of its publication this year.

I'm glad I did!

Audio

Jim Dale's presentation is outstanding.
That says it all