Hello, everyone! Last month, I gathered a round-up of adaptation news from the past six to seven months that I had covered in my bookish rounds posts. The six to seven months was an arbitrary number, and I had missed some adaptation news in choosing that limit.

I read this as a child, but I had to reread it as an adult. It's even better the second time around.

I read this as a child, but I had to reread it as an adult. It's even better the second time around.

Whereas I really liked [b:Alice in Wonderland|138516|Alice in Wonderland (Ladybird Classics)|Lewis Carroll|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389447680s/138516.jpg|40821941], I found this one a bit more predictable. It was a good book, and it was really funny at times, but all the reciting of poetry had me bored. I mean, yeah, it was some fun things, but I didn't find it fitting for this kind of book. It sort of lost its magic.
This book was no different from the first one, the adventures and experiences were pretty much the same, and I found no character development.
And yet still, I really liked it. I could imagine my mom reading it out loud to me. Now, having read these stories, I'm sad that I didn't get to know them as a child. I'm sure I would've liked them!

When I read Lewis Carroll’s first and more iconic children’s novel concerning Alice’s adventures, I swam through it joyfully, but nearly thoughtlessly. I found it readable, but its madness seemed, at the time, to gleefully flick me on the end of my nose for seriously considering what the book’s subtext could be. For whatever reason, the wrong side of a looking-glass provided a more lucid point from which to take in Carroll’s inventive and rewarding confection of a story. This time around I gleaned the value a child, or an adult, might get from carrying his or her whimsy out of Wonderland, and back home.

Adults so often frighten children, thinking that they are teaching them to escape danger, and therefore stay safe. But one need not frighten children into avoiding whatever is nasty in the world; even when a good story does use fear, it is not to petrify and immobilize children, but to give them something to overcome. What’s brilliant about Carroll is that Alice’s adventures, both down the rabbit hole and through the looking-glass, do not even use fear at all as the hurdle to be overcome. He deals instead with madness, nonsense, and silliness. The view one gets on the other side of the looking-glass is skewed, but it is still just a backwards version of the real world. All the misused language and anti-logic employed by queens and knights can be found just as often in ordinary life. What better way to stimulate children then to teach them how to sniff out bullshit, but also be able to laugh at themselves when they step in it?