As much as I love Peter Newell's illustrations (such as the one above) for Alice, I'll be focusing primarily, and for good reason, on John Tenniel's wood cuts. |
Tomorrow we ... hmm -- that may be overly optimistic. Try again:
Tomorrow I begin Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, followed immediately thereafter by Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (which titles I will more generally refer to as AiW and LG). Amidst the readings (and since I'm going to read these anyway and ask myself all these questions anyway, I might as well post it all here ... anyway), you may expect a tangent spearing "The Hunting of the Snark," and another bent on--or around (heavy gravity here) --the expunged, "The Wasp in a Wig," the latter of which has particular bearing on my needful reread ("reread," by the way, is a spondee, rather than the iamb or trochee of TV over there).
I need to really dissect these books, so expect the typical questions and discussion (well, "discussion," should anyone care to answer the questions), which, together with Shakespeare's As You Like It and Barrie's Peter Pan, which I will not be taking apart here (though if you haven't read them, I encourage you to do so -- and I do expect that I'll "review" both), as their influence is somewhat less than that of Carroll's, all of which are coming to form a sort of skeleton for my new project. (No. I'm not rewriting any of these. Really, once I'm done with my book, you'll be hard pressed to see the similarities. Hopefully.)
I heartily invite your participation.
Those of you who made suggestions for books to read after the hiatus, fear not: the Alice books are very short. We'll be done with both inside of four weeks.
I've been wanting a chance to look through these again for a while anyway. They seem like the type of books that you will find a little bit more each time you read them.
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