World Famous Comics: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Penguin Classics)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Penguin Classics)
By: Lewis Carroll Publisher: Penguin Classics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Penguin Classics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 400 Publication Date: April 29, 2003 Release Date: April 29, 2003
Wonderland I just finished reading "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There" in two days. There's a reason why these stories are considered classics. Like "Peter Pan" and "Chronicles of Narnia", these are tales that help us return to our childhood and re-experience the magic that we've felt and imagined. A smoking caterpillar and a disappearing cat may be absurd, but they're really imaginative. And I do believe that "Wonderland" and "Looking-Glass" are open to interpretation, since the word play and the riddles found here are too silly to be scientific.
I don't mind Hugh Haughton's annotated texts, as long as just enjoy reading these two children's tales peacefully.
A
Only Two Stars for the Penguin Edition It's a fantastic book, of course, and it certainly doesn't need me to praise it as millions have done before. It's probably one of the most unique things ever written: the only book that could be considered both completely a children's story and completely a book for adults. The only problem with the Penguin edition is that it's grossly over-annotated. For scholars this may be very helpful, but sadly enough a lot of the notes are either irrelevant to non-professors or provide critical instead of historical or biographical commentary which, in my opinion, ruins the greatest delight of the book: AAIW/TLG are highly interpretable and symbolic stories, but unfortunately the commentator is always interrupting like a nagging pedant before the reader has a chance to reflect. Once again, both stories well deserve their status as true English classics but another edition might be a better choice.
Delightfully silly and witty I had not read these books since I was probably seven or eight, and I am glad that I finally got around to reading them again. These are some of the most fun childrens books (or any books for that matter) ever written. A previous reviewer gave this book a poor rating because it was only a childrens book. I fail to understand how being a childrens book means that a book is bad. Many childrens book are among the best books that I have ever read. Just because a book is a childrens book does not mean that it is a book just for children. Lewis Carroll wrote this for children, but it is probably even more enjoyable for me to read now than it was when I was a child, for now I understand many of the double meanings and world plays that you would never understand as a child. Carroll is better with word plays than any other author that I can recall reading. He is a master of molding sentences that simply slide right off of your tongue because they flow so smoothly. This is definitely one of the best childrens books ever written.
Overall grade: A+
pay no attention to the fool below me I was shocked when i saw that the Alice books got 3 stars. these are literary classics , the two most complicated "children books" with many levels of interpretation. I know people have different tastes but this deserved an overall score of at least four.
Just rent the movie The first thing that must be said for anyone who's seen Disney's Alice in Wonderland and wants to read the book because they loved it so much is beware. The book and the movie, while following the same story line, are nothing alike, and if you expect them to be you'll most likely end up as disappointed as I was.
Perhaps it's because I grew up with the fluidly poetic Dr Zeus, or perhaps I just expected something that the book simply was not, but I found Carroll's tale bland and void of the essential, natural art to story-telling that all "absurd" imaginative pieces need to be enjoyable.
Though I must give credit to Carroll for what I feel he deserves- in his time, this was a wildly fantastic book with a plethora of crazy characters, riddles, poetry and inspired plot twists that carry the reader around Wonderland with the famous protagonist. The Characters however, were truly brought to life by Disney to a degree unrealizable within the written format. I don't fault Carroll for this, but when you've seen the movie first... I also found the transitions between scenery and scenes to be lacking in impact because there is little distinction made between one place and the next. I realize that Carroll was describing a dream (which is vague by nature), but I feel that his writing could have accentuated the transitions to give the reader more involvement in the fading between one land and the next- what we have instead is something close to "Alice was walking in a forest and now she's crossing a river." Call me picky, but such a lackluster transition is bound to bore.
Most agitating were Penguin Classic's annotations that literally littered the text with information completely irrelevant to the story. Boasting on the back that my copy is "the most comprehensively annotated edition available", they weren't lying. To get this title though, they stuck an annotation into every nook and cranny manageable. By the end of the fifth chapter I almost threw the book out of the bus window because I had read more about Lewis Carroll's diary entries and queer habit of wearing gloves everywhere than of Alice herself. At that point I more or less stopped regarding the annotations at all- content instead to deny their existence rather than try my patience at reading them. I was upset at this because there were several places where an explanation, allusion or elaboration was truly helpful, but they were one in stack of fifty and the remaining forty-nine were just too painfully superfluous to sift through
Through The Looking Glass also failed to leave an impression on me. It was a very simple extension of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but in the same exact format, with the same trite transitions and utterly lackluster performances.
I thought it was a painful struggle to finish Through The Looking Glass, and then found myself face to face with Carroll's original short story Alice's Adventures Underground- the original short story that he had written for the young daughter of a close friend which his friends had urged him to elaborate upon. Following that, I found an essay written by Carroll, Alice On Stage, about his thoughts on the cinematic production of his tale. I'm sorry; I just couldn't bring myself to bother. That was enough of Lewis Carroll for me.
As I implied at the start, stick to Disney's movie. I love to read, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a story meant to be seen and heard, not read about.
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