I’ll be honest with you. I originally bought this book because I really, really love the cover designs from the Word Cloud Classics editions of classic literature. I have a few of them now, and I just adored the bright, happy blue of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Check out my #CoffewithCap hashtag on Instagram, it’s how I tag my current non-study reads!
However, Alice in Wonderland (as it is more commonly known), also had two further functions beyond dressing up my bookshelf: a) I have actually been meaning to read it for over a year now, though I only bought it recently. I started a classic literature kick last year, particularly classic children’s literature, and you can’t go far past Alice in Wonderland for that! And b) I think that this book quite nicely fulfills the “unreliable narrator” prompt for the 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge, my reading list for which can be found here. For one thing, Alice is a young girl and in my experience, young children are not the most reliable of storytellers, relying as they do on the incredible power of imagination to embellish their tales. Also….girl was dreaming some mad wild dreams, y’all. I don’t know how everyone else dreams, but I can’t remember dreaming more than maybe twice in my entire life. I tend to just pass the heck out, and wake up when my alarm goes off.
Anyway: the book. I really, really enjoyed it. It wasn’t an overly complicated read, so I was able to enjoy it without having to employ laser-like focus (hah!) to follow the storyline, or to re-read certain sections to figure out what was happening (we’ve all been there, don’t deny it!). It is a children’s book, so I wasn’t expecting it to be a hard slog or anything, but children’s literature these days is not what it used to be. Kids classics do require a mite more attention than, say, Captain Underpants, no matter the commercial success.
I enjoy the way Lewis Carroll writes; I often found myself giggling along, as I imagine actual children once did when reading this. Having said that, I am actually glad that I didn’t read this until I was older (cough mid-twenties cough). I find myslef saying this of most of the children’s classic literature that I have read over the past twelve to fourteen months; I think I appreciate it more now than I would have as a child. However, if I had read it as a child, no doubt I would have been a touch more insightful and voracious I reader than I was.
The childlike manner in which this was written, including the hilarious manner in which Alice spoke, acted, and treated both herself and the other characters properly earns this book a spot in children’s classics. I fully, completely recommend that you read this book, at your earliest convenience. Contrariwise, you should read if inconvenient as such emotions would put you quite in line with the book!
Five star lit.
C. Jaiyah
Featured images credit: Alice-in-wonderland.net
Categories: 2017 Reading Challenges, Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Classic Literature, Fiction Reviews, Goodreads, Reading Challenges
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