There seem to be two chief reasons why people don't read the Alice books any more; or, to put it more accurately--as Martin Gardner does in his introduction--why only academics keep the stories alive. To be sure, the Alice legend, with all its glorious wordplay and idioms still in use in colloquial English today, is well known. But it is not much read.

The first reason is that it is simply a children's story full of puerile nonsense, and the second reason is that it is a drug trip with no real meaning (or perhaps too fertile for meaning). Both reasons are related and indicate why only academics continue actually reading the books. Today's reader will not get much out of reading the books and they cannot possibly compete with reading more acceptable of an adult (here I choose to refrain from examples). To be sure, there is much truth in this estimation. The books are in fact full of nonsense to the ignorant reader, of whom without these annotations, I would be one.

Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's pseudonym, was an Oxford mathematician with a passion (probably platonic) for little girls. Alice Pleasance Liddell was to remain for Lewis Carroll what Beatrice was to Dante. (Fun fact: Dante's own masterwork, [b:The Divine Comedy|6656|The Divine Comedy|Dante Alighieri|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390760180s/6656.jpg|809248], began with the poet being led down a sort of rabbit hole and ended with his child-love Beatrice helping him ascend.) And because of the time (nineteenth century), locale (Oxford), the profession (math), and the subject/object of the book (Alice), many readers are bewildered by a book undoubtedly full of inside jokes, familiar in general to Oxford citizens of the time and to Alice Liddell in particular.

Therefore, in approaching the Alice books today, this edition, packed with Martin Gardner's stunning annotations, is arguably the only way to have a go at the text and walk away with a good experience. Otherwise one runs the risk of falling into the valley of lemmings content with chalking the whole story up to a drug trip (the white rabbit as cocaine and so on). Plus, as Gardner states in his introduction, he is careful to stave off from all-too-easy interpretations as the symbolic and the psychoanalytic. What we get are top-shelf pickings from virtually the entire corpus of Carroll scholarship, of which there is an exorbitant amount.

For me, I enjoy the second book, [b:Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There|83346|Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, #2)|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1359299332s/83346.jpg|17240250], far more than the first. What's not to love, really? In this book, Carroll the mathematician shines. The narrative is built around a game of chess, with Alice as a white pawn working to advance to the other end of the board so as to become a queen. And all the while, pieces are moving around her, altering her experiences. Brilliant! In addition, the wordplay and Easter eggs (e.g. the closing poem is an acrostic using Alice’s name) are taken up a notch from the previous book, giving way to a fruitful experience for any who enjoys a pun time and a good puzzle.

Looking-Glass is a sort of precursor to a Borges short story, in that it makes use of mirrors, chess, time, space, perspective, and so on. Carroll gives special attention to symmetry (mirror images: the real house versus the looking-glass house; Tweedle-dee versus Tweedle-dum; etc.) and parallax (apparent change in perspective due to movement of object relative to another object). These elements are akin to another nineteenth-century mathematician-writer, Edwin Abbott, in his monumental little book [b:Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions|433567|Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions|Edwin A. Abbott|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1435435775s/433567.jpg|4243538].

I highly recommend reading this version of the Alice books, whether you've read the book or not. The introduction, annotations, and analysis make the story and legend come to life, without skewing your position one way or the other--that is, Gardner's sampling of criticism is wide and balanced. Don't fall prey to those who have heard so much about the book that they don't feel the need to create their own experience with it. ( )

Really wonderful. Illumines many Victorian commonplaces that aren't so commonplace today, and provides source material for Carroll's allusions. I felt as though I was taking a class with dozens of Carroll scholars whose opinions, insights, and guesses the editor, Martin Gardner, uses as annotations when original source material does not exist (and even when it does). The result is a feast of information and insightful literary criticism for the diehard Alice fan and a great reference for anyone who feels that the book is a 150 year-old inside joke that largely leaves the modern reader out. ( )

Well, the annotations aren't as comprehensive as I would have liked. But I guess it's better to leave analysis to the professors and just give facts. Most of the annotations explain the poetry that Carroll's parodying, which is nice. They're all verse that would be common in Carroll's day, but have become antiquated since (except for one or two). Others illustrate the history (like relations to the real Alice) and the logic jokes he probably thought were hilarious (like how "Through the Looking-Glass" follows real chess moves). Otherwise, all the illustrations and text are here. So it's nice to read it again, this time with a better understanding. It even includes the official definitions for the words in Jabberwocky. ( )