I think I’ve seen Disney’s Alice in Wonderland only once, many years ago. All I remember of it was that Alice was a bit of a whiny kid, and that it was pretty out there. And that Cheshire cat. Well. Crazy characters, man. Crazy characters.
When I put together my list of 40 books to read before my 40th birthday, I thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There might be a nice fit: after all, it is a classic, and I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise.
As it turns out, I probably wouldn’t have missed much if I hadn’t read them. Sure, there are a couple of entertaining episodes in the book , but overall, I thought it was a bore. Alice is a whiny kid, obsessed with doing the proper things to do. Even by the proper standards, adjusted to seven year-olds, she’s annoying to an extreme degree. What also didn’t help, was the dry as dirt 80-page introductory notes and 100+ pages of end-notes and additional material in the back of this volume.
So far, I think that most of the books on the list had several things going for them. This was the real first dud.
- Book read
- Lewis Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- First line
- Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
- Book read
- Lewis Carroll — Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
- First line
- One thing was certain, that the white kitten had nothing to do with it—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.