My Reading Journal 7 Team L 林孟萱

Book title : Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

Author : Lewis Carroll

Illustrated by : Nilesh Mistry

Retold by : Jennifer Bassertt

Publishing house : Oxford University Press

The novel belongs to a series named "Oxford Bookworms Library".

This simplified edition was published on 2000.

This story, "Alice's Adventure in Wonderland", describes a very curious dream of a girl named Alice. One hot summer day, Alice and her sister were sitting under a tree. Her sister was reading, but Alice had nothing to do feeling stupid, sleepy and bored. Suddenly Alice found a White Rabbit and followed it without thinking, and running down a large rabbit hole and into the Wonderland, she began her adventure. There happened many interesting things to Alice in the Wonderland, where the White Rabbit wore gloves and always hurried to somewhere and there were food which could make you smaller or bigger, where the Caterpillar smoked a pipe and the Cheshire Cat with grin, where the March Hare was having mad tea party with the Hatter all the time and the Queen of Hearts only liked red roses and wanted to cut everyone's head...

This is a fantastic, innovative story. Many things in the story are all strange and make no sense. But anything is likely to happen in a world of dream. We can use our imagination freely and create things we fantasize in a dream or make things we desire a lot like reality. When we are sleeping, sometimes we have a good, sweet dream; sometimes we have terrible, disgustful nightmare, and sometimes we just have an incomprehensible, indescribable dream feeling confused to it. Some people say that dream shows our unconsciousness, because while we fall asleep, we are in a totally relief condition. I think that is interesting. We can release in a dream, but we can't indulge in daydreams. We should set several achievable goals and realize them. When we carry our dreams out, we will get sense of accomplishment and feel happy.

The author, Lewis Carroll whose real name is Charles Lutwidege Dodgson, was born in 1832, and was the third child of a family of eleven children. As a child, he was good at writing word games and puzzles, and latter he was also good at Latin and math. He taught mathematics at Christ Church at the University of Oxford from 1855 until his death in 1898.

Dodgson wrote books about math, and he was a good photographer, too. But his famous work is "Alice's Adventure in Wonderland". It began as a story told to a real little girl called Alice Liddell, during a boat trip on river one summer. And it was published as a book in 1865. A second story about Alice, called "Through the Looking-Glass", followed in 1871. The two Alice stories, full of clever word games and verses, are among the most famous children's book. They were also important because they were the first stories for children which did not try to teach them how to be good.

"Alice's Adventure in Wonderland" is read both adult and children; it has been translated into many languages, made into plays and filmed many times. The characters in Alice's dream are now part of English. For example, we talk of people "grinning like a Cheshire cat", or being "as mad as a hatter". And when something strange happens, we will say "Curiouser and curiouser", like Alice in her dream.

This journal is the last one in the semester. In the period of this voluntary reading, I didn't spend much in my reading, but I did and took it serious. I always chose a story which is relatively famous and familiar to us. I think that would be easier and helpful for me when reading if I had some concepts of the stories. After finishing those world masterworks in its original language, I felt a sense of achievement and happy even though those are the simplified versions. Through the writing of reading journal every time, I would review the stories and survey what I got from them; that pressed me to reflect and distinguish. And I also tried to train my ability of paraphrasing by writing journal. But it seems that I didn't do well. I sometimes still can't catch the points and describe too much trivial details. Anyway, I made efforts and work with care, and I really learn something in the process.