Curiouser & Curiouser...

But back to Alice: to read Alice as an ebook is a unique experience in itself. It is as if we have drank the verboten potion that said Drink Me and we did so knowing that everything shrank and we, by contrst seemed to grow as books became the size of our palm and we became as giants by contrast a difference from the books of yore when you held a book on your lap, by god, and had to lay the oh-so-unwieldy thing before you.

To retell the story of Alice's adventures would be to rehash what most of us anyway, already know. What interests me more are the parallels between her world in Wonderland or Underground as it was, and our world above ground now. Books have shrunk (micropsia) and we appear by contrast to have grown (macropsia) and we hold these tiny and powerful devices that make us feel as giants and that beep at us when we are late, late for a very important date... it gets curiouser and curiouser as Alice would say.

This brief book is far easier to read than the longer, second version, Alice in Wonderland and more, to get a true sense of Carroll and his original writing it is worth reading Alice's Adventures Underground which was, for the record, all originally hand written with illustrations by Carroll himself (not the later version with Edward Lear's illustrations - that would come later), and was printed in a run of only 500 or so copies for the Children's Hospital.

For a beginner with ebooks, Alice's Adventures Underground is the perfect read for anyone new to using a handheld device: not only is the book rather brief, but it's a great story full of varied meanings and interpretation and surely more than a mere children's book.

Allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole, find ebooks, find Lewis Carroll and find a whole new world with a breadth of information as you build your own perfect library no bigger than the palm of my own small hand.

sadi ranson-polizzotti

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