(The Alice who has Adventures in Wonderland, that is.) I’ve written a blog post about why I love Alice here to celebrate the release of the new Vintage Classics edition of this utterly brilliant book.
A confession: As much as I love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, my favourite Alice book is actually Through the Looking Glass. (The Red Queen! Humpty Dumpty! Jabberwocky! The White Knight! The Anglo-Saxon Messenger with his Anglo-Saxon attitudes and his bag of ham sandwiches and hay!) But sadly, there isn’t a Vintage Children’s Classics edition of Through the Looking Glass.
Extra note: if you know any artistic Australian students in Years Three to Six, you might like to draw their attention to this competition being run by Random House. Students are asked to choose their favourite title from the Vintage Children’s Classics collection, then send in a design for their own cover, with big book prizes for them and for their school. Entries close on the 1st of October. (If I were entering, I probably wouldn’t choose Black Beauty or The Wish Pony, because horses are really hard to draw. I would probably choose Treasure Island, because I like drawing pirates and parrots. Or maybe A Brief History of Montmaray, because it has pirates and puffins.)
It depends on my mood, whether I like Wonderland or Looking Glass better at the time. Luckily I’ve only ever read them both in one volume, so I can cheat and just count them both as one book, so I don’t have to decide!
Yes, I own the combined volume, too. I’m not sure why Vintage didn’t add Through the Looking Glass to this one – maybe they’ll put out a separate edition of it later.