The Lewis Carroll Showdown: Through The Looking Glass vs. Alice in Wonderland

This may help you decide:

hard one!

it's a tough call but my first reaction is to go for through the looking glass, so i'll stick to that

plus looking glass has the red queen & the white queen, to wit:

I've been meaning to read both of these for the past 14 years or so. I haven't read either one except in abridged versions

through the looking glass.

I decided I like Looking Glass more when I was a kid, so it's an unexamined default prejudice. But thinking about it right now I reckon Wonderland is probably the better book. Except you don't have to choose and more often than not they're bound in the same volume like the lovely Penguin edition.

i can't really separate the two in my mind -- i read them both like 800 times each as a kid.

i've always meant to try carroll's 'other' two-part fantasy book, sylvie and bruno. anyone read it?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'm voting Looking Glass because of the mindfuck that hits you when Alice sees the sleeping Red King and asks what he's dreaming and is told he's dreaming up reality, and that if he woke up everything would disappear. When you're a kid and you read that it is a paradigm shift.

Gotta go with Looking Glass, not least of all because one of my domains is "neverjamtoday.com".

http://neverjamtoday.com/aliceRQWQ.png

also, the Disney Alice in Wonderland: extraordinarily irritating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen

I vividly remember as a kid loving them both, but really, really being spun out by Looking Glass. So I'll go with my inner kid on that one.

Yeah, to varying degrees, Wonderland is more about the fractured fairy tales and Looking Glass is more about the head-twisty connundrums. Both are great though. I picked Looking Glass, but you wouldn't want to be without the Hatter from Wonderland. (Or other favorites.)

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice26a.gif
"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!"

That of course is one of the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations, but I love these others, too: http://www.exit109.com/~dnn/alice/

I especially like the Atwell and the Rackham ones, but they're all suitable for framing, to say the least.

The Tenniel illustration of an elongated Alice terrified me as a kid! I read the book so many times but would dread reaching the page opposite that illustration.

I remember thinking as a kid that Looking Glass was better, but I'm not sure what that was based on because I also remember finding it kind of impenetrable and confusing, and I can barely remember more than a few scenes from it. Maybe the nascent corny indie Autechre fan in me was just delighted by the concept of preferring impenetrable and confusing things to the more obvious classics.

This is the funniest thing ever written:

'You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: 'let me sing you a song to comfort you.'

'Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

'It's long,' said the Knight, 'but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else—'

'Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

'Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'

'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself.

'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'

'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'

Also:

'There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint,' he remarked to her, as he munched away.

'I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested: 'or some sal-volatile.'

'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing LIKE it.' Which Alice did not venture to deny.

And THAT'S why I voted for Looking Glass.

'Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

That's funny by itself. It's great the way Alice barely hides her contempt. She's both proper Victorian child and snotty teenager.

That's just one of the things that that awful Disney movie fails entirely to capture.

'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing LIKE it.'

I have overused this joke in conversation. Maybe someday I will be able to come back to it, and use it again.

Ha, me too.

This thread has a) made me want to reread both books and b) reminded me I got a book called "Lewis Carroll in Numberland" for Christmas (family of mathematicians - not a talent I've inherited) which I haven't read yet.

(I feel like I'm forever posting "I should reread this" on ILX threads and not doing so. If I combined all the piles of books I've bought and never read, never mind old ones I want to read again, they'd probably reach the ceiling.)

(Ha, googling that book abt Carroll finds a couple of gently positive reviews and a disdainful one from the New Statesman by Gilbert Adair, of Perec's "La Disparition" translation fame = hero. Apparently he wrote a third Alice book in mock-Carroll style.)

haha i need to read these books again, i totally lost my shit at that alice/white knight exchange.

i actually like the disney movie, tho it's not remotely in a class with the books -- i don't think any movie could really manage to retain everything good about the originals. the svankmajer film captures the creepiness, but not the wit.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Asking anyone to choose between these two is fucking criminal.

I decided I like Looking Glass more when I was a kid, so it's an unexamined default prejudice.

I'm the same: I even sort of suspect that I decided I liked Looking Glass more because it was the second book and not everyone had read it.

my uncle has recently been claiming - with what basis i do not know - that a relative of mine was the model for the white knight! but i've also heard the model was Dodgson himself, so, you know.

somehow have never read any lewis carroll in my life, and read part of TTLG last night when i couldn't sleep, and hoooolllllleeeeee shit, this is so good

yeah these would prob be my desert island books

so looking forward to reading these to my daughter after we finish this stupid Harry Potter book

i need to revisit these, it's been years.

Looking Glass was easily my favorite over AIW

neither book is better: looking glass for its systems and its antilogic, alice for its nightmare-vision of victorian social mores and for alice herself, just punk enough to be a comfort amidst the cruelly high stress levels. (the messenger-footman-duchess-baby-pepper sequence reminds me of the alfred molina scene in boogie nights.) i'd say something like, the first book's about the outside world, about society, and the second book is about the inner world, about the mind, but i'm sure that's not true, tho the first does have lots more crowd or chaotic ensemble scenes compared to the second's hermetic little groups and lonely solipsists (like the red king, or indeed dinah). as a kid i much preferred the second because it blew my mind more; as an adult i think i prefer the first because i recognize it more.

we covered it at length in one of doc casino's disney poll threads, but the animated movie is imo underrated amongst people who read: cutesy in places of course but a much more faithful adaptation of the book's menacing drift than you'd expect.

(the burton movie is an abyss.)

Annotated Alice FTW

(the messenger-footman-duchess-baby-pepper sequence reminds me of the alfred molina scene in boogie nights.)

ha, that's a great comparison

Annotated Alice ONLY after you've read both the originals a dozen times - it's fascinating but sucks some of the joy out of them.

i've always meant to try carroll's 'other' two-part fantasy book, sylvie and bruno. anyone read it?

No, but I'm similarly fascinated - all I know about them comes from the AA explaining that he's stealing jokes from himself.

That of course is one of the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations, but I love these others, too: http://www.exit109.com/~dnn/alice/

This is great but misses out the ones from Tove Jansson of Moomins fame.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/30/tove-jansson-alice-in-wonderland/

I have overused this joke in conversation.

Yeah, me too - these books have also contributed a fair few phrases that I casually use ("Jam tomorrow" comes to mind) as well as metaphors like the Walrus and Carpenter crying to cover up their slaughter of the oysters - one of the things about working in a company with a fresh influx of students every year is realising that the number of people who actually get the references is dropping, though it's nice that it never hits zero.

The Gilbert Adair third book is very odd to read - I see what he's aiming for and he hits it pretty much, but it just feels fake throughout.

'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing LIKE it.'

That reminds me of every solo singer-songwriter that has "he has been compared to Dylan" translates to me as "He is not as good as Dylan"

I really like Carroll's original drawings

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_UeYSv_n2J_Q/SyKfYvgjGMI/AAAAAAAAQjs/4cNBtqiK8Ok/s400/AAUG+Mock+Turtle+Carroll+illustration.gif

I've read both Sylvie and Bruno books. Intriguing for Carroll-philes, but imo too dense and bizarre for children.

it's fascinating but sucks some of the joy out of them.

You think? I find the annotations really enjoyable in their own right.

Plus, there are so many jokes I absolutely would not have caught without the annotations.

realized last night that i haven't actually read the alice books in god knows how long, so i picked it up and sped through about half of the first book before falling asleep last night. (my copy is the annotated alice, so i'm doing my best to ignore the annotations.) tbh it is probably not ideal bedtime reading, all the menacing aspects of the story really come across very vividly when you're not fully alert.

one thing that jumped out on me on rereading is that i'd always thought of alice as a very practical, no-nonsense kid who was sort of the stoic straight man to the jokers around her, but she's really not. she's a dreamy and imaginative kid who keeps going off on these weird silly tangents -- "do cats eat bats? do bats eat cats?" and annoying the other characters almost as much as they annoy her. my memory was prob influenced by the disney movie, where she is a bit of a stick in the mud. carroll's alice is actually a fairly realistic depiction of a child. which is interesting since he seemed to succumb to all the usual victorian sentimentalization of children in his letters and other writings (those dedicatory poems that precede the alice books are so mawkish it's hard to believe the same guy wrote them).

I read Sylvie and Bruno, but it was almost 30 years ago so I don't remember them very well.

I haven't read the Alice books in ages either, I should read those to my son.

Sylvie and Bruno is not very good. It feels like an attempt to do bring the same magic back but for adults, but feels like a bit of a going-through-the-motions exercise.