A Reader on Reading

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Who Am I?

“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

“You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,”

Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — “I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?”

Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4

A Reader in the

Looking-Glass Wood

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, in a house that no longer stands, someone gave me a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Like so many other readers, I have always felt that the edition in which I read a book for the first time remains, for the rest of my life, the original one. Mine, thank the stars, was enriched by John Tenniel’s illustrations and was printed on thick, creamy paper that reeked mysteriously of burnt wood.

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