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vegantrav 's review for:
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition
by Lewis Carroll
This annotated book contains both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The notes are helpful in clarifying a handful of Victorian idioms and colloquialisms as well as in pointing to some of the sources (especially for the poems) that Carroll was parodying or referencing, but a good number of the notes are too long, running well over a page, and are more pedantic than educational.
As for the two stories themselves, they are, by and large, entertaining, but they certainly read much better as children's literature than as literature for adults--even with Carroll's occasional allusions to issues of logic and the philosophy of language.
The stories are episodic with no substantive plot, but the episodes are entertaining, and Alice is an endearing character. With so many strikingly bizarre incidents, these are certainly not forgettable stories, and one can see why these stories have come to pervade our cultural consciousness. However, these are stories written explicitly for children, and because of that, there is not much thematic depth (even with Carroll's light-hearted attempts to address problems of logic and language) nor literary heft to these stories. They are, as is apropos of children's literature, fun and airy, but they are also often childish.
As for the two stories themselves, they are, by and large, entertaining, but they certainly read much better as children's literature than as literature for adults--even with Carroll's occasional allusions to issues of logic and the philosophy of language.
The stories are episodic with no substantive plot, but the episodes are entertaining, and Alice is an endearing character. With so many strikingly bizarre incidents, these are certainly not forgettable stories, and one can see why these stories have come to pervade our cultural consciousness. However, these are stories written explicitly for children, and because of that, there is not much thematic depth (even with Carroll's light-hearted attempts to address problems of logic and language) nor literary heft to these stories. They are, as is apropos of children's literature, fun and airy, but they are also often childish.