Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is the sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which takes place 6 months after Alice's trip down the rabbit hole. This time it's a snowy night, and Alice begins to wonder what the world beyond the mirror is like. In the first book there were distortions in size, but in the second, time and space are out of whack - time runs backwards and forwards, and distances are great and small - and the mirror world has becomes a giant chess board.

On this playing field, where everything follows its own strange anti-logic, all the characters are mirrors of each other: from the White and Red Kings and Queens, down to little Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Other timeless characters such as Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, and of course the Jabberwocky, all battle it out over whether Alice will become the White Queen. Tim Burton's recent movie Alice in Wonderland is a mixture of the first and second books, but so was the original Disney movie - at this point the two are so muddled together it's best just to read them back to back.