Which book should I read for 2017?
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Thursday, May 7, 2026
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Let's Bust a Recap : Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Curiouser and curiouser.
Despite the fact that I've had, not just one, but two copies of Lewis Carroll's most famous work sitting on my shelves for years (we got that Barnes & Noble edition in 2015 for our anniversary!), I just got around to actually reading these classics for the first time ever last week. And I have to tell you: it was not the best of times.
Both our copies contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—originally published in 1865—and Through the Looking-Glass—originally published in 1871. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was an immediate success upon publication and is now one of the best-known—and many scholars even say most important—works of Victorian literature. It has never been out of print and has been translated into 174 languages. Through the Looking-Glass did equally well, and both novels have been adapted for the screen, radio, ballet, opera, musical theater—even board games and theme parks!
If you're unfamiliar with Carroll's greatest successes (which would be difficult to believe given their enduring popular appeal), in his first novel—a pillar in the genre of literary nonsense—Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. She grows to dizzying heights and shrinks into almost nothingness by eating or drinking different things, she cries a literal ocean of tears, she contends with the disappearing Cheshire cat, she plays an insane game of croquet in which the balls are live hedgehogs that get up and run away and the mallets are also live flamingos whose necks flop around, and sasses the King and Queen of Hearts who are constantly putting everyone on trial because the Queen can't stop screaming "Off with their heads!" at everyone she comes across.
It's a strange, fever-dream of a story—a baby turns into a pig, for crying out loud!—and Through the Looking-Glass is much the same only this time, Alice enters a fantasy world through a large mirror and finds herself in a place where everything is backwards and she's trying to become a queen in a game of chess. She talks to live flowers, meets the severe Red Queen and the flustered White Queen, quarrels with Tweeledum and Tweedledee, discovers how rude Humpty Dumpty is, and finally becomes a queen herself at which point she is named the host of a chaotic banquet.
I didn't particularly enjoy any of it.
As I've said many a time, children's literature may be my very favorite genre in all of literature. I was expecting to at least appreciate Alice for its place in the canon, but instead of coming off as charming, Alice only read as strange to me. It was dark and weird and, at times, even unsettling. Alice herself was sometimes precocious but mostly bewildered, and while it was certainly imaginative, it wasn't imaginative in a fun or even particularly playful way. I just couldn't get into it, and I didn't care for it. Frankly, I'll never forgive Lewis Carroll—or shall we call him by his proper name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—for calling daisies the worst of the flowers, and for not making any of the flowers especially pleasant, for that matter!
I guess none of this should come as a major shock to me since I always thought the classic animated Disney film was rather strange, and if Disney can't make something sparkle, then the source material must be pretty dark. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have both been picked apart and analyzed to death by critics and scholars the world over for all its symbolism, linguistic puns, mathematics, fantastical rules and games, and all the nonsense. I cannot be the least bit bothered with any of that, and so I'm done with Alice. I doubt I'll ever revisit these novels though they will remain in my library for their classic status, and I will happily lend them to any of my friends or family who care to read them.
But I wouldn't personally recommend them, and I'm truly puzzled as to exactly why they are so beloved.
Do you like Alice and her strange adventures?
Thursday, April 30, 2026
2016 : My Life In Books
Which book should I read for 2016?
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Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Let's Bust a Recap : Carry On, Jeeves
2023 was definitely the year that contributed the most books to my current book list. There were seven books from my list that year that I never got around to reading, and Carry On, Jeeves was one of them. After my first introduction to Wodehouse in 2022, he got an automatic spot on my 2023 book list. The Inimitable Jeeves provided no end of laughs and considering that I dropped a pretty significant amount of good American money to add the Bertie and Jeeves collection to my personal library in 2020—ah, the year of massive online book shopping for me, how were you coping with the madness?—I wanted to make it a habit to read some Wodehouse each year.
Alas, here we are, four years later before I finally picked up the second installment in my Wodehouse collection. And if we're being realistic, it'll probably be another couple of years before I pick him up again seeing as next year I'll be tackling My Life In Books project—have you voted yet?—and Wodehouse lived and died well before I was born. But not because I didn't enjoy Carry On, Jeeves. It was just as much of a riot as The Inimitable Jeeves, and I found myself laughing aloud again during every outrageous story.
This collection of ten short stories which were popping up in the Saturday Evening Post were published together in London in 1925, and in New York in 1927. In this anthology, we get the origin story of how Jeeves came to be in Bertie's employ. Jeeves is enlisted, again, numerous times, to help Bertie's friends out of all manner of scrapes, particularly those having to do with maintaining good standing with wealthy aunts and uncles who bankroll their nephews' lives, and, of course, the frequent romantic entanglements they find themselves in. To give you an idea of how disastrously things turn out when Bertie tries to manage these conundrums without Jeeves' help, in this collection he inadvertently kidnaps a child, among other things. And this collection ends with a story from Jeeves' perspective in which he arranges for Bertie to give a talk at a girls' school after Bertie gets a wild hair to invite his aunt and three nieces to come and live with him. Jeeves is having none of that, and Jeeves always knows best.
Another rip-roaring, laugh-out-loud good time. Douglas Adams said that "Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever" and I think I might agree with him. I have one more collection of short stories to read before I get to an actual novel in my Bertie and Jeeves library, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how Wodehouse's novels compare to his short story collections. If you haven't read Wodehouse yet, move him up your TBR.
What books or authors do you turn to for a good laugh?
Thursday, April 23, 2026
2015 : My Life In Books
Which book should I read for 2015?
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Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Let's Bust a Recap : Anxious People
Fredrik Backman exploded onto the scene in 2012 with the publication of his debut novel A Man Called Ove. If you haven't at least heard of it, you're probably not a big reader. I finally got around to reading it myself ten years later in 2022 and joined the legion of fans Backman has garnered the world over. Despite the fact that I've had two of his other books—Britt-Marie Was Here and My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry—sitting on my shelf for five years now, I found myself purchasing a copy of Anxious People a few weeks ago and diving right into it when my book club chose it for our April selection. And may I just say: Backman has done it again.
On opening this book, the first thing I read, of course, was Backman's dedication:
This book is dedicated to the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends.
And to my wife, who lives with us.
Are you kidding me? I'm already sold.
Chapter one opens with a bank robbery and a hostage drama. In his second paragraph, Backman writes, "This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for." So begins an investigation into this bank robbery turned hostage drama. Father and son Jim and Jack are the two police officers on the case, interviewing the hostages who were all released from the apartment viewing they attended the day before New Years Eve after being held there by an armed bank robber who had just tried to rob a cashless bank across the street.
A cashless bank.
Backman has this uncanny ability to capture the strange messiness of being human in such a profound and profoundly funny way. His books make you laugh out loud, they make your heart ache, they make you nod your head in agreement thinking "yes, that really is what it's like!" Anxious People in particular is one giant reminder to remember that the people around you are going through their own stuff. Stuff you may never know about. But stuff that compels them to make the choices you've deemed idiotic. And they are idiotic. But the choices we make may seem just as idiotic to the next guy who doesn't know our stuff.
So be kind.
It's just brilliant. Anxious People came out in 2019 and the English translation by Neil Smith in 2020. While A Man Called Ove is still easily my favorite of the two, I absolutely loved Anxious People. Given the nature of the police investigation and the host of colorful characters, Anxious People feels very scattered in a somewhat disjointed way, and Backman did a great job of keeping me guessing the entire novel. There isn't really a main character to anchor the story so you constantly feel like you're being pulled in different directions from beginning to end. But it just works.
If you haven't gotten around to reading Fredrik Backman yet, add my voice to the chorus of people recommending you move his books to the top of your TBR. He's becoming a favorite and it will not be another four years before I pick up another one of his books.
But which one next? Britt-Marie, or My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises?
Thursday, April 16, 2026
2014 : My Life In Books
Which book should I read for 2014?
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