About book The Complete Works Of Lewis Carroll (2005)
What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations? I agree--especially conversations. And the conversations in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are some of the most famously fabulous confabulations. (Don't mind me, I just like how that word sounds). These pictures, by illustrator John Tenniel, were very important to Lewis Carroll and his story.It's been many years since I've read these stories, and I am surprised to find them both profound and hilarious. (But then, I am not the same person I was yesterday.) It now seems obvious that Alice's shifting size, discomfort, and confusion simply describe being--a child. By the way, Alice is seven and a half years old, and she is always the voice of intelligence and innocence in the rather insane, more adult world around her. The sequel story, Through the Looking Glass, has a darker, more serious tone, in my opinion. I know that the first time I read this, the fact that there is a chess game on the entire time was lost on me. Alice begins as a pawn, and that train ride she takes at the beginning is her first move--a big one, since pawns are allowed to move two spaces in their first turn. And the way the queens move so fast (making Alice run and get out of breath) corresponds to the way a queen is allowed to move. Near the end, the white knight who rescues her, and is so clumsily falling off his horse, left and right, is demonstrating his L-shaped moves, as well. After her encounter with the knight, Alice has only to cross over one more brook before reaching the eighth rank promotion to queen. She wakes up after capturing the red queen.Note: evidently, back in Lewis Carroll's day, most chess sets were red and white, instead of black and white. I don't know much about chess, so this would be what I notice. :)Another thing lost on me was the famous conversation with the white queen, when she says, The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.' I took for granted that that was pure silly nonsense, but it was actually meant as a pun. It is a rule of Latin grammar (which I don't remember learning myself in Latin class) that "iam" means "now," but only in past and future. In the present, the word would be "nunc." (i and j are interchangeable in Latin.) Evidently, this quote became so famous that it became an expression for asking for too much, as in "I suppose you want jam on that." What was not lost on me the first time was the poems. The Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter, especially. And Alice's conversation with Humpty Dumpty, and how he translates some of the words in the first poem is fun. (He's quite the egg head.) There is so much to love, here--and I know it's all been said before. I am very glad that I picked it up again!
The Compete Lewis Carroll is one of a very short list of books I've begun and couldn't get myself to finish. I derived no enjoyment from the book at a certain point and that is where I stopped (Sylvie and Bruno chapter 7). I realized for the last few chapters I had been wondering to myself "how much longer until this is book is done?!". When reading feels like an obligation and chore the book will always be shelved.The Alice stories weren't terrible and themselves would have likely received a 2 star rating from me. Once I hit 'Sylvie and Bruno' all bets were off.The page count was this collections enemy as much as the writing. The continued tossing in of one dimensional often short lived characters among incredibly absurd circumstances began very quickly to wear away at my endurance.The conversation between characters also seemed to be gross repetition of verbal versus text based jokes. You can almost hear the author giggling to himself after writing the one-thousandth conversation revolving around a misunderstood word or mistakenly taken as literal word or phrase.Overall if you want to check out the Alice stories go ahead but I very much recommend picking them up individually and avoiding the rest of Lewis Carroll's writing.
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I found this in a bookstore in Myrtle Beach and was ecstatic. It had "The Hunting of the Snark", which I h ad heard of, but never read, and the Sylvie and Bruno books, which I had never even heard about, with a other stuff that was all bonus.Sylvie and Bruno are nothing like Alice. They are, frankly, very sweet.I particularly dug the Sillygisms after I had taken Logic in college, five years later.I have had to buy a second copy and it is pretty beat up, but I'm not willing for it to be absent from my bookshelf.
—Kitty
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is famed for his magical stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, here illustrated throughout the inner pages by Sir John Tenniel's much loved drawings. However, inspired by the insatiable Victorian appetite for party games, tricks and conundrums, this eccentric and polymathical Englishman also wrote many other works of a humorous, witty, whimsical and nonsensical nature such as the mock-heroic nonsense verse The Hunting of the Snark, as well as dozens of other verses, stories, acrostics and puzzles, all of which are included in this volume.
—Pardis Parto
it's funny how often editions on here are listed under the editor or translator. at first i had some trouble figuring out how they catalog books, until i realized that anyone can create their own entries. :|
—Courtney
