Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

I loved the Alice books as a child and even more as an adult. As a child, I loved their absurdist humor; the situations Alice gets into are ridiculous, and the ways she gets out are even more so. As an adult, I love that the absurdist humor asks really interesting questions about language and naming and self, our ideas of time and space, and social conventions and who’s in charge of them.

All this with hilariously eccentric characters and nonsense poetry that isn’t quite nonsense! To top it off, reading Alice as an adult is a trip because so… show more.

Carroll – like Tolkien, an Oxford don – combined whimsical nonsense with arch satire in this lasting surreal fantasy of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts, all beautifully illustrated by John Tenniel.

The language dances through puns and parodies to create a shimmering dreamworld of preposterous distortions, crazy perspectives, and crazier characters. It is probably the most inspirational book of the period.

The first film version appeared in 1903, and there have been scores of movies since then – Walt Disney admitted that no story in literature fascinated him more – as well as… show more.