Friday, May 09, 2008

Book Review: "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

I've long intended to read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and finally did so over the past few days using the Oxford World's Classics edition (containing the original John Tenniel illustrations). Carroll's story, bizarre as it is, remains witty and nonsensical (just as it was intended to be).

With the ridiculous and improbable characters he's famous for, Carroll manages to tell a good yarn, even if things are never exactly as they seem. I was actually surprised at how similar the Disney version of Alice's adventures are to their source materials: while the two books are combined into one film and the events are taken out of sequence, most of the scenes were portrayed with quite reasonable accuracy.

Fun reads, so long as you can find it within you to suspend your sense of normal.