★★★☆☆ Entertainment for grown-ups disguised as a children's book

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

Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel (Illustrator)

I believe I was about seven years old when I first read Alice under the mistaken impression that it was a children's book. I didn't much like it. I came to appreciate it more when I was a college student. It is not, in fact, a book well-aimed at young or middle-grade kids.

Charles Dodgson, who wrote the two books of Alice under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, was a well-known Oxford mathematician and philosopher. Alice is full of logic tricks and clever word-play. Consequently Alice is much beloved of mathematicians and such-like degenerates (among whose company I now count myself). Indeed, mathematics writer Martin Gardner annotated an edition (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass), and in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid mathematician and artificial intelligence researcher Douglas R. Hofstadter has much to say about Alice, particularly about the translation of the nonsense poem Jabberwocky, which is almost as famous a poem as there is in the English language.

I'm not claiming that there is no entertainment for middle-grade kids to be found in Alice. Indeed, it is interestingly subversive in introducing children to mathematics and logic. But there are much better children's books out there. It serves better as adult entertainment (the type of adult entertainment without naked ladies).

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AnonymousApril 25, 2023 at 10:28 AM
Always look forward to Dr. Avery’s reviews!
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