Written by: Lewis Carroll
First line: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
Why you should read this book: Obviously, I have read Alice in Wonderland dozens, perhaps even hundreds of times in my life, but not, apparently, once in the last fifteen years since I've been keeping this blog; Alice was such a formative part of my childhood, so deeply embedding in my psyche that I suppose I didn't need to reread it because it existed inside me (although it's perhaps a little weird that I never read it to my stepdaughter, but she had her own ideas about books and gravitated toward more modern stuff). This is the tale of an inquisitive little girl who falls down a rabbit hole and come out in an altered fantasy world to be ordered around and abused by birds, rabbits, playing cards, and various other unlikely creatures while changing size on a regular basis and never quite understanding the rules of this brave new world. Alice is the basis of much children's fantasy literature and a fair amount of adult content generated in the one hundred fifty years since its original publication, and while some of the references that might have made sense to its original readership have faded into nonsense for today's children, the overall balance of sense to nonsense has remained about the same, as some of Alice's stranger experiences have morphed into common tropes in kids' entertainment.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You enjoy remaining completely unconnected to a shared sense of culture.
