Reviews

"The question is", said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be the master -- that is all."

And a good question it is! Though this collection holds far more than just the well-known Alice in Wonderland stories, those were my favourites. Carroll is incredibly witty and really has a way with words that shows best in those stories and, in my opinion, a few short stories and some of his poetry. He masterfully constructed Alice Through The Looking-Glass according to moves during a game of chess. It blew my mind. His Oxford-themed poems make me miss the place so much, as he does it justice.

His poems are often wonderfully melancholic, something I am quite the sucker for. He also knows how to point where it hurts without scaring his readers away, which makes his poetry all the more intense.

However good Carroll may have been at writing, it becomes abundantly clear towards the end of the stories that his real passion lies with puzzles, riddles and mathematics. As the latter is definitely not my forte, I struggled greatly getting through his puzzles but had a bit of fun with some. Quite another thing were the 'Sylvie and Bruno' stories, which felt like Carroll had perhaps unleashed a little too much of his creativity on them. They are not necessarily complicated but the devil is in the details... and well, there are just a lot of devils in semanitics. The plot of both stories was also bizarre and all over the place, I struggled to keep up but am still impressed by what I could gather from it.

Nevertheless, there is some real brilliance in this collection. He asks big questions and it not afraid to challenge the extremes that people around him indulge in. I'll come back to the weird stories, as I might appreciate them more once I've been confronted by too much realness.