Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

     At the beginning of January I started reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I have heard a lot of things about these books, some good some bad. I've seen various renditions of Alice in Wonderland, my favorite being the  1999 version with Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Short, and Christopher Lloyd. So I decided it was finally time for me to read the books. 
     Alice in Wonderland takes Alice on a crazy journey through Wonderland from a Rabbit's house to, the Dutchess's peppery house, a tea party, a beautiful garden and a courtroom, all the while changing sizes about as many times as locations. I got through this first book pretty fast, mostly because I knew in general how it went and I could visualize it better.
     Through the Looking Glass was even more wacky to read, in my opinion. In this one Alice get into another world by going through a mirror. In this story  she meets Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, Humpty Dumpty, the Red and White Queens, and a crazy Knight. With this book I had a little harder time getting through it. There were some parts of it that I had see in various Alice in Wonderland tellings, like the Tweedles and the Knight. But I had a hard time with the way that a lot of the characters behaved towards Alice. For example Humpty Dumpty wasn't a very kind character, he was condescending to Alice.
     The biggest problem I had with these books was that there was no blinding moral to them. I'm quite use to reading books with a message, some moral dilemma that the main character has to overcome that teaches a lesson. I couldn't find one in this book. When I thought about it a lot and did a lot of stretching to get it to fit this story, I thought that one could make the moral of being happy with what you have and who you are fit. But that's still a stretch. I came to this conclusion because throughout all of Alice in Wonderland, Alice is changing sizes and appearing in different places. She has a problem with it, but it comes to not see so important by the end of the book. I don't know how well this moral fits Through the Looking Glass because she doesn't really have that same problem in that story. Like I said I'm not really use to not having a moral to a story, so if someone has a better idea for a moral for these two stories please comment and shed some light on it for me. 
     Overall I didn't really care for either books, even less so for Through the Looking Glass. I mostly read them because they are classic pieces of literature that people have enjoyed for quite some time. I however don't really think I'm one of those people. They seemed a bit rushed, in the fact that Alice is always in a different place or around different people every chapter (and the chapters weren't very long). She was never in one place or around one set of person(s) for long enough to really learn anything from them usually. Now that I have it out of my system, I probably won't read these stories again, at least not for a long time. It just wasn't my cup of tea. ​

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