Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll, 1865/1871)

After watching Tim Burton's take on Alice in Wonderland, and in need of a shot of fiction while I finished China: A History I picked up Lewis Carroll's original stories off the shelf - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There - which I have packaged in one book with notes. 

It's taken me about 5 days to polish off both Alice adventures, since they were written for a children's audience they're hardly heavy-duty. I liked them, they were a nice diversion but I fail to see what an adult audience can derive from them, other than the clever use of language, and the stylistic tricks and puns that Carroll clearly revels in. As I read the first book, I had the voices from the Disney animation running through my head, and I knew the story - other than the excising of characters such as the Gryffin, Dodo, and Nurse, the Disney movie is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although with Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum with their Walrus and the Carpenter poem thrown in (and taken from the sequel). So there were few surprises there. 

I enjoyed Through the Looking-Glass more, possibly because the story was new to me, although it still followed the episodic nature of it's prequel. It did have some sort of a plot though, as Alice moved through the Looking-Glass land (not explicitly the same place as Wonderland, although the Hatter and March Hare have semi-cameos) as part of an elaborate chess game to become a Queen. Both books suffer from the fact that they describe dreams - there's no attempt to suggest that these adventures actually happened. 

The Alice books were a nice, easy read, with some lovely language, which as an English student I did appreciate, I just think that you'd have to be a lot younger or academically studying the books to get the most enjoyment from them.