Shabbat Reading: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

#whatireadovershabbat Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, edited by Hugh Haughton (1865; Penguin, 2003)

Someone defined a classic as a book that, when you read it for the first time, you have the sensation of rereading. I knew Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for most of my life without having read it. The book, it turns out, is as delightfully strange as its adaptations. What I couldn’t anticipate was its dreamlike calm. The antic zaniness of the film and stage productions finds hardly any parallel here. Alice, a logician’s creation, confronts the nonsense around her with earnest rigor. I hope this is the first of many discoveries in many (more) rereadings to come.