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

WOW! Just wow!!! I am so lucky I got this edition of Alice in Wonderland!!! I remember looking at this Amazon page and seeing 1 left and thought, “Oh cool, I’ll buy it later!” Little did I know it was out of print!!!! When I went back, it was sold out... Now a month later, WorldofBooksUSA was selling a used copy for super cheap!!!! I’m so lucky! I love the look of the book so much - it’s really pretty and I love the size of it too. Not too big, not too small. I am so thankfull i saw someone talk about this book on twitter.

Carroll's stories are playful challenges to logic, identity and issues of existence. In this reading I experienced Alice's adventures as a loving, continuously changing puzzle that forces a child (and readers) of rigid upbringing to expand consciousness. The games, riddles, homophones and startling responses of characters force Alice to encounter, if not fully appreciate, a novel point of view. She also experiences awkward, frightening and near dangerous situations that force her to glimpse profound existential, emotional and philosophical experiences. Carroll introduces Alice to different values, perspectives, environmental changes, personal transformations and questionable assumptions about attitudes as well as her own definition of herself. Death is close at hand: The Red Queen's "off with her head" repetition, falling into oblivion, shrinking to almost nothing, near drowning, threat with being smoked out of Rabbit's house. These skirmishes never put her in real harm's way, but she learns that danger is real. She also learns that she can look for external opportunities to help herself and can rely on her own wit and inner resources, e.g. find help, look for "poison" label, stand up for herself with the flowers, the caterpillar, the Red Queen, have internal conversations with herself about reality and walk away from impossible situations, e.g. the Tea Party and Tweedledee and Tweeledum's accelerating nonsense. She deals with incredible points of view characters have about herself. To the caucus race participants she's the giver of the prize. To a bird she's a serpent. To the White Rabbit's neighbors she's a monster. To the Cheshire cat she's mad. To the Red Queen she's a subservient child. To the Caterpillar she is an unknown. To the flowers she is an ungainly wilting flower. She may not exist at all and only have gossamer substance in the Red King's dream. Her challenge is be herself while she is undergoing change and challenge. Carroll cajoles us into wisdom. Joanna Poppink, MFT Los Angeles psychotherapist author of Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from your eating disorder

Always wanted to read this story since I was a child. Most enjoyable and a fun read.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion novel, Through the Looking-Glass, form an enduringly strange and brilliant duology. These tales are far more than whimsical romps through fantastical lands — they are surrealist puzzles, philosophical playgrounds, and cultural mirrors that continue to enchant and perplex readers of all ages. Though often lumped together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have distinct tones and structures. Both follow Alice, a sensible girl dropped into thoroughly nonsensical worlds: first through a rabbit hole into the chaotic dream-logic of Wonderland, then through a mirror into a more structured, chessboard-like realm. Wonderland is a tumbling disorder full of talking animals, shifting rules, and queens obsessed with beheadings, while Looking-Glass is more of a surreal thought experiment, populated by living poetry, mirrored rules, and unsettling nursery rhyme characters. If the first is all riddles and reversals, the second feels like an upward climb toward queenship, meaning, and a strange kind of self-awareness. Both show worlds run by folks who absolutely should not be running the world. Through it all, Alice is as polite as she can be. Carroll’s characters are unforgettable weirdos who’ve pitched tents in the collective unconscious. From the fretful White Rabbit and the cryptic Cheshire Cat to the haughty Red Queen and the delightfully befuddled Tweedledee and Tweedledum, each figure feels both iconic and symbolic. Some represent the adult world’s hypocrisy, others embody logical paradoxes or childhood anxieties. Their nonsensical dialogue is often razor-sharp satire disguised as silliness. They are real in that sideways way. They’re not metaphors, they are archetypes of dysfunction. And Alice, when she doesn’t outright defeat them, walks away. Though often labeled children’s stories, these books are subversive and complex. Carroll’s background as a mathematician shines through in his love of paradox and his relentless wordplay as the engine of the narrative. Logic, grammar, and social norms are constantly upended. Alice isn’t just navigating strange places; she’s navigating meaning itself. The poems, puns, and riddles twist language until it starts to resemble something closer to truth — or at least, a more honest kind of nonsense. Carroll games the English language like an old pinball machine and never tilts. And it works because Carroll seems to understand better than most that language is a power tool. Or a tool of power. Either way, people in power often speak the most nonsense with the greatest confidence. Alice is a triumphant protagonist: curious, skeptical, occasionally indignant, and deeply grounded in a child’s sense of fairness and reason. She’s not a wide-eyed innocent but a sharp observer who meets absurdity with exasperation rather than awe, making her the voice of reason in a world that gleefully resists it. Neither helpless nor perfect, she holds her own against the madness. In doing so, she becomes the grounding force that allows the books to spiral, twist, and tumble without losing their center. Alice is just trying to make sense of it all, get to where she thinks she should go, and make some friends along the way without getting her head bitten (or chopped) off. Aren’t we all? These books endure because they resist a single interpretation. They can be read as nonsense or satire, fantasy or dreamscape, children’s story or commentary on Victorian society — or all of these at once. Carroll invites readers into a world where nothing is fixed, and that openness keeps Alice fresh with each reread. Together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange, clever, disorienting, and absolutely iconic for reasons that are both obvious and, frankly, impossible to explain. They remind us that logic can be silly, that childhood contains profound insight, and that language itself is a kind of magic. If you’re willing to wander, they’ll take you somewhere worth going.

Perfect

This review is for the Penguin Classics paperback edition. I feel this is the best edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass available. Tenniel's pictures are reproduced perfectly and it includes Alice's adventures underground and notes for the reader to explain certain things. Great for any Alice fan.

How can you go wrong? It still stands up.

I love Alice in Wonderland. I've been reading it since I was a small child, hence I can honestly say that whoever retyped this for the Kindle did a shoddy (my peers would say "half-assed") job. Oh, it's readable, don't get me wrong. But if we'd bought this as a paperback, there would be an outcry, so why not shout out one for the eBook crowd? Shame on you! There are tons of typos. The quotation marks are in that cheap ASCII nearly-sideways type that makes you blink more than once until your eyes adjust. Italicized words jumped between actual italics to underscores before italicized words (e.g., I will prosecute _you_). John Tenniel's illustrations are non-existent (oh, the horror!!). But my biggest complaint, though, is the presentation of the poetry. In fully-justified, unpunctuated paragraphs. Are you serious, Kindle publishers?!? I got my first taste of things to come with "The Mouse's Tale" (Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house...), usually written in a fun, swirly format with decreasing font size. (You can see the original at [...]). I realize this would have been difficult to redo in the Kindle format, especially when the user is given the option to make the font bigger or smaller at will. But at least put it in stanza format! I tried to reproduce the result of the attempt, but Amazon's comment box reformats everything, so I'll try to demonstrate: Fury (huge gap) said (huge gap) to a mouse That he (huge gap) met (huge gap) in the (huge gap)house Let us both go to (huge gap) law, I will (huge gap) prosecute you. It's the worst example of full-justification allowable - the humongous gaps between words, no punctuation, three or four words per line...and so forth. Making the text bigger or smaller made it worse. The rest of the poetry is in plain old paragraph format, with punctuation thrown in haphazardly or missing altogether. In "Through the Looking Glass," consider the presentation of "The Walrus and The Carpenter." The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low; And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. "The time has come," the Walrus said To talk of many things Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--Of cabbages--and kings--And why the sea is boiling hot--And whether pigs have wings. Readers might find this a little thing, but I'm sorry, this just bothered the hell out of me. I guess I should have expected it. I only paid 99 cents for this version, and you get what you pay for. And for God's sake, don't fall for the "free full versions" out there that were typed by "scholars" and available on the web for nothing - they're worse yet! So I give this 3 stars - a wonderful story brought low by lazy copy-editing. Honestly, publishers, if you're going to redo a classic for the Kindle: (1) Include the original artwork, (2) format it correctly so it resembles the original hard copy as much as possible, and (3) spell-check it, for crying out loud. Don't make Kindle owners wonder what other crap is in store that will make us sorry we bought the thing and just reach for our old paperbacks instead.

What is there to day it's a classic must read.

These word cloud books are just fantastic. Feel good, look good, read good. Ideal travel companions! No e-reader for me! And Alice in Wonderland, say no more. The highest re-read factor! I only wish there were more word cloud books, it's a marvellous collection.

Joli petit livre avec de belles illustrations !

Ottima edizione di wonderland+looking glass con: -testo in lingua originale unabridged -illustrazioni originali di Tenniel a colori -copertina rigida clothbound -pagine spesse, senza trasparenza Formato tascabile. Lo stile della copertina e la finitura dorata delle pagine (presenti in tutta la collana Macmillan Collector's Library), a mio gusto, sono perfette per i due racconti di Alice.

Que livro é esse?!!! Meu deus, muito lindo. Ele é pequeno (de bolso) mas eu achei ótimo, pois da pra levar na bolsa. Capa de tecido, detalhada, borda dourada LINDA! as ilustrações são muito caricatas, eu amei demais. Uma leitura gostosa, que costumo fazer as vezes. Obs: Comprei ele há uns anos, por isso está surradinho.