Alice in Wonderland fictional world

A girl follows a rabbit in a waistcoat down a hole and lands in a country with no interest whatsoever in being sensible. The doors are too small, the cake gives instructions, a cat leaves its grin behind after the rest of it has gone, and a queen who cannot lose at croquet sentences everybody to death without meaning much by it. Through a mirror the same rules run as chess: you sprint to stay where you are, you are told you may only be a figure in someone else's dream, and nobody will explain the poem. This is Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and Looking-Glass country, gathered with what has grown out of them — Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the handwritten version he made as a gift; the nursery and stage adaptations that began almost at once; and the individual set pieces, from the rabbit hole to the garden of live flowers, printed on their own for a century and a half. The pleasure is logical rather than whimsical, which is what most retellings miss: Carroll was a mathematician and the nonsense is exact. Read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland first, then Through the Looking-Glass, which is the stranger book and the better one. Everything else here is a variation on a story first told out loud on a river, on one afternoon, to keep three children quiet.