In my very few free moments in the past month, I picked up and read Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (Young Adult, 117 pages) by Lewis Carroll. I’ve been meaning to read this for a really long time and I can’t believe that I never did, but now I have. This also means that I’m going through a rather alarming amount of the books on my reading list for my extended research trip – the same research trip that got unexpectedly bumped up.

My first thoughts on reading and completing this story was that it was written rather well for a younger audience. There weren’t too many times where I thought a young adult reader might not have the same kind of thought processes and impatience issues that Alice clearly demonstrates. And I’d have to say that the book is a lot stranger than the Disney version. I’m not really sure why I expected the book to mirror more closely to the Disney cartoon, but it really didn’t. Maybe it’s because the Disney movie had to tie everything more closely together rather than letting the entire set of odd experiences be just a dream, something like a story where a solid villain is needed.

I’m not really sure that the Queen of Hearts qualifies as a villain. I’ve now seen several different movie versions of this story, and none of them were very close to the book, if you look at the book’s overarching story. There was the Scy-fy version of Alice that took place in modern times and made the normal humans into gambling slaves, and the recent 3D version that had Alice facing off against the Jabberwocky to save Wonderland from the Red Queen. In both of these versions, the Mad Hatter becomes some sort of weird heroic character that I don’t think the book had designed. Maybe the movies are all based on Through the Looking Glass? That is also on my list of books to read, so maybe I should finish updating this or add a new listing once I’ve read that as well.