Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2010
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass
By Lewis Carroll (1865, 1871)
The only good thing, I found, about having gone to Rugby School, the famous and wretched boys' boarding school in the British Midlands, is that Lewis Carroll went there too. The two Alice books are wonderful for children, and in some ways perhaps too good for children, full of adult wisdom and trickery. The first book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was initially met with dismissive notices (though John Tenniel's illustrations were well received), but it quickly became a beloved classic. What is most admirable about the second book, Through the Looking-Glass, is that it is emphatically not a return to Wonderland; Carroll's great feat is to have created two entirely discrete imagined worlds for his heroine. I have loved Alice all my life and can still recite "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory if asked to do so, or even if nobody asks.
Peter Pan
by J.M. Barrie (1911)
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-55)
The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman (1995)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon (2003)
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