Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

 

I hadn't read any of this since like middle-school, and I figured it'd be interesting to renew my acquaintance. Uh, this ain't really good stuff, y'all. There are some occasional moments--every native English speaker probably knows some of them--but the overall things are really disjointed and shockingly uninteresting. I don't think it's just the datedness of the prose, it seems more like the wildly disjointed narrative wherein Alice is never really anything more than the one things are happening to, she rarely does much of anything (she's a seven-year-old Victorian girl, this is probably to be expected). What occurred to me was that the book probably does a decent job of what it's like to be a child--especially what it was like to be a Victorian chlld--with parents and other adults dragging you around without giving you any say and spouting things at you that make no sense but which they tell you are real. I dunno if I'm getting more contrarian as I get older (gawds, I hope not) but I was deeply unimpressed with this.