The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Lewis Carroll, Ralph Steadman, "Alice in Wonderland"

Started January 25 - Finished January 25, 2002; 108 pages. Posted 26 January 2002

See, this is why I said it was unnecessary to cite the page count. The book is only 108 pages, but it's a fucking HUGE book!

My sister told my other relatives stories of the two of us as children at Thanksgiving this year. I was amazed by how much she remembered. For some reason, I don't remember very much of my life until after my parents got divorced and I reached the fourth grade. She explained that since we were allowed to watch hardly any television, we both read all day, so much so that my parents instituted a "no reading at the dinner table" rule. But I hardly remember any of the books I read as a child, aside from Encyclopedia Brown and the Judy Blume Fudge chronicles.

The one other book I do remember reading was Peter Benchley's Jaws, but the only reason I remember that is because I read it for a school oral report, and after I finished the instructor told me I couldn't do that particular book because it was "too adult." (Later on in the same class, we had to do projects on American cities and I wanted to use Mario Puzo's (of The Godfather fame) chronicle of Las Vegas. She wouldn't let me use that one, either. And my mom always wondered why I never did well in my K-12 years. (Well, K-10 anyway. I got thrown out of school in my sophomore year.)

But I digress. (Again!) So I couldn't remember if I ever read any of the Alice books before. I knew enough about the storylines, but couldn't figure out if that was because I had actually read the books or just knew it from pop culture references. I would probably still be wondering that if I hadn't gone on the Lewis Carroll tour at Christ Church College (which is never supposed to be referred as such, which is why I do).

As part of the package of taking classes in England last year, they set up a weekly field trip, and it was getting a little boring. "Yep, there's another really big, old church," I'd say. "Neat. Wanna grab a pint?" But the Carroll tour was different; we had a great presenter who combined the history of the church with the history of the pedophile, mixing fact and folklore expertly.

The tour finished in the lunchroom quarters, underneath stained glass that had characters from the storybooks imbedded inside. (This, by the way, is the where they filmed the eating scenes for the Harry Potter movie - I can recognize it from the commercials.) I know others in our group were impressed as well, as everybody rushed over to the gift shop to buy copies of the novel. Then I remembered Ralph Steadman had illustrated a commemorative edition of the stories. If I was going to read the stories, this was definitely how I wanted to do it.

I searched around the town for copies of these books, but nobody had even heard of them. I ended up purchasing this and Through the Looking Glass through Abe.com and paid $25 for each, probably the most I've ever spent on a single book.

And now that I've read this, I can safely say I'd never read it before. I was actually surprised by how much was completely new to me. Here's where I'm going to get in a lot of trouble with some people, though: I didn't really care for it. Oh, it was sporadically cute and amusing, but I just couldn't get into it like I figured I would. Steadman's version of Alice doesn't really work for me, either - something about how she is drawn makes her look like she's 19 years old. If that were the case, Lewis would have been uninterested in her and these books never would have been written. The White Rabbit is dead-on, however, and the Cheshire Cat looks strangely like George Bush, Sr.

Maybe I'll like Looking Glass better. It does make me want to see how Joe's going to illustrate my book, however. Hurry up already, Joe!

I take my test for Columbia University on Sunday, so I'm not reading anything that's not study-related until then. Maybe.


Rating: I'd say it's worth spending about $15 for, so figure out the rating for yourself.

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