Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: And What Alice Found There

Rating:
Summary: pay no attention to the fool below me
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: pay no attention to the fool below me
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Just rent the movie
Review: 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.