Last read it about 10 years ago. Difficult to read without visualising the Disney version to myself. ( )

An abridged but marvelous re-telling of this story. It shows a smart girl in a green pinafore with an apron who strives to make sense of an uncertain world. She is courageous and undaunted. And the illustrations are soft and sweet, a contrast to the satire and confusing themes in the original. ( )

A quick audiobook that was more fun than I thought it would be having never read this book before. Loved the narration. ( )

There is no way I was going to let the sesquicentenary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland pass without revisiting this longstanding favourite. I devoured this book as a child (almost literally, as I had a paper-nibbling habit when I was little) and have re-read it many times as an adult. My favourite edition would have to be Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice, as Gardner did such a great job of giving us insight into Carroll's text.

For this outing I was lucky enough to get hold of a version of a rarity: the Swedish version illustrated by Tove Jansson, another childhood favourite of mine, reprinted recently with the English text.

There is no point reviewing the novel, as everybody surely knows it, so I will just comment on the illustrations, which were my main reason for selecting this edition. Jansson's Alice looks like a more modern girl than John Tenniel's prim and proper Victorian in her starched petticoats. The style seems to me more dream-like than the Tenniel drawings, which seem quite naturalistic to me, and possible better suited to the narrative. Where Jansson really has fun is in crowd scenes such as the caucus-race and the trial, where she works in a whole range of little creatures that she endows with great expression. I liked this set of illustrations a lot, although I doubt that anything can displace Tenniel's work as people's mental images of this book.

I've probably read Alice more than 100 times, but I was keen to see this edition. I had heard for many years that there was a very limited and expensive edition of the book with illustrations by Salvador Dali. This edition, released for the 150th anniversary of publication, is the first commercial edition to include Dali's illustrations.

I'm assuming that everybody knows Carroll's story, so I will concentrate on Dali's contribution. It actually feels strange to read this book without Tenniel's original drawings; they form an indelible part of my memory of the book and have firmly defined the characters and scenes in Carroll's story for generations of readers. Tenniel's drawing is about as naturalistic as you can get in a story this wild; Dali's work is a huge difference. Dali doesn't really try to illustrate scenes literally; his illustrations are dreamscapes where characters from different parts of the novel appear and the action is only suggested. Motifs from his own work appear; the illustration for the tea party includes a melting watch, a perfect reference to the Mad Hatter's difficulties with Time.

The illustrations are packed with scribbles and splashes and are as incoherent as most dreams are. Given that the whole story is a dream (or several) this seems appropriate and Dali brings out some of the scary elements in the story that Tenniel glossed over. The reader feels the need to examine each picture closely to tease out the relationship to the storyline, which makes this quite a different experience for those who may feel that they have done this book to death. ( )