2 books down, 51 to go!

So my internet has been down and I haven't had a chance to post until now, but I finally finished Alice and Through the Looking Glass. I actually really liked both of them! At first I was a tad overwhelmed with how fast crazy stuff started happening. But I quickly got over it and just accepted the book for what it was. Reading the books felt like being in a dream -- everything seemed to happen in segments, without any part really connecting or leading up to another. Characters would leave as quickly as they came, and Alice would accept this and move on to the next part of the dream. I guess Through the Looking Glass is loosely based on a game of chess but I've never played chess, so apart from acknowledging the knights on horses, the two different colored queens, and the fact that Alice is trying to move the different squares, I didn't really get this. Oh well.

The thing I liked most about these books is how everything in Wonderland and the Looking Glass is the way a child thinks things should be. Let me explain. Alice comes across peculiar things and they are explained in a way a child might imagine. For example, Alice is surprised when she meets flowers that can talk because she's never known flowers that talked. The Looking Glass flowers tell her that the flowers she knew in her world had very soft flower beds so they slept all the time, but their beds were more firm.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle teach Alice the Lobster-Quadrille and they sing a song about fish. The Mock Turtle then tells Alice no wise fish would ever go anywhere without a porpoise. Alice asks if he means "purpose" and he replies, "I mean what I say." Growing up as a child who actually probably wouldn't want to go anywhere without a porpoise (I love dolphins!), I found this particularly amusing. Overall, both books were surprisingly funny - I found myself quietly LOL'ing while reading on the plane back from Austin. The lady sitting next to me probably thought I was a big freak. Although she was kind of a nutcase herself. Whatever.

I watched the Disney cartoon after finishing the books (I hadn't seen it in a long time) and noticed that a lot of the parts were taken exactly from the books, but completely out of order. It didn't really matter, because like I said the book is segmented into a bunch of nonsense without any real rhyme or reason. The movie is silly and cute but I found Alice a little bit whiny. Book Alice is much more mature, easy-going and generally likeable. I definitely prefer the book. (This may be partly because I fell asleep drunk to the movie and woke up 7 hours later confused by the annoying DVD screen.)

The next book on my list is 1984 by George Orwell. I'm a few chapters in and, to be honest, a little freaked out. This book is a little dark for my taste, but I'm intrigued. More to come!