Podcast and text: Alice’s Adventures Underground on the Tungsten E

Note: You can enjoy an MP3 of the essay below from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, TeleRead’s e-book reviewer.

I can understand what it is like to have fallen down the rabbit hole in a number of ways. And I can relate to our dear Alice as she makes her way through the myriad gardens in Alice’s Adventures Underground, the original title of Alice in Wonderland. Who would have ever thought I’d be reading this of all books on a Tungsten E no larger than my palm? The pages scrolled effortlessly before me as I sat bumping along on the subway, garnering strange looks from the curious, and reading the next book on my list.

Lewis Carroll‘s masterpiece, of course, is a classic, but does a classic work as an e-book; and can it work so well on a palm device?

Luckily, Carroll tends to write short; that is, his sentences are not overly long or run-on. They are clear, concise and the dialog is simple. This book may and does work on an adult and on a child’s level (the interpretations are myriad and I won’t try to get into them here–that’s a whole other article). And the interpretations come across and the readability remain excellent even on a smallish screen in 10-point Times type.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice, of course, had no business poking around the rabbit hole or following white rabbits in the first place–no more than I have any business sticking my nose into e-books as I move further and further away from the printed book and see the virtue that e-books can carry just as much as a p-book.

Just ask me what the trouble is and I’ll tell you quite simply–it’s marketing. Too few people know these classics and new books are available and more. Too many are, I admit as I was, concerned about readability (and with my vision I was especially concerned, since I have trouble seeing at all). In the end, though, we, like Alice, “drink the Kool Aid” as the expression goes; and we join the throngs of people who have come around to seeing the virtue of e-books, including such big name publishers as Macmillan.

Among the e-publishers are virtually almost any large trade publishing house–not to mention the exclusively online venues like Blackmask and Lulu, where ebooks are readily available for the picking and the reading.

Curiouser & Curiouser…

But back to Alice: to read Alice as an e-book is a unique experience in itself. It is as if we have taken the verboten potion that said “Drink Me” and we did and everything shrank and we grew. Meanwhile the books became the size of our palm print and we became as giants by contrast; quite a difference from the books of yore, or what seems like yore, when you held a book on your lap, by god, and had to lay the oh-so-unwieldy thing before you.

I joke, of course, but we become so spoiled by technology that if our Internet connection is down for a day, it is as if we cannot work at all. Everybody just stops whatever it was they were doing and mills about their office looking rather lost and confounded. What, I think back, did we used to do before the Internet, back in the days of typewriters and hand written letters and each letter hand-typed? I remember now, we used to keep working–letters still got banged out on our old IBM Selectric, which I for one, miss, and the world kept turning and life moved on.

To retell the story of Alice’s adventures would be to rehash what most of us anyway, already know. What interests me more are the parallels between her world in Wonderland or Underground as it was, and our world above ground now. Books have shrunk (micropsia) and we appear by contrast to have grown (macropsia) and we hold these tiny and powerful devices that make us feel as giants and that beep at us when we are late, late for a very important date. It gets curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

This brief book is far easier to read than the longer, second version, Alice in Wonderland . To get a true sense of Carroll and his original writing, it is worth reading Alice’s Adventures Underground. For the record, Underground was originally hand written with illustrations by Carroll himself (not the later version with Edward Lear‘s illustrations–that would come later), and was printed in a run of only 500 or so copies for the Children’s Hospital.

The first and handwritten copy was presented to Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean at Christ Church where Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwitdge Dodgson) was a mathematics professor and an ordained Deacon. In his free time, Dodgson was a great photographer as well and often used the Liddell children and others of friends as subjects for his work (of which there has been much controversy, though nothing conclusive and it only through a contemporary lens that Dodgson’s work looks suspect).

For a beginner with e-books, Alice’s Adventures Underground is the perfect read for anyone new to using a handheld device: not only is the book rather brief, but it’s a great story full of varied meanings and interpretation and surely more than a mere children’s book.

Allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole, find e-books, find Lewis Carroll and find a whole new world with a breadth of information as you build your own perfect library on a device no bigger than my own small hand.

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Moderator’s note: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a former publicity director and editor for David R. Godine, Publisher, and has worked at Conde Nast Publications, The Atlantic Monthly and others. She has been widely published and now writes regularly for several publications including the famous Cleveland Blogcritics, Geek2Geek, Boston Globe Arts Section, and she has also written for Publisher’s Weekly, Independent Publisher and others. Visit her Web site.

Enjoy Sadi’s podcasts regularly by pasting the TeleRead audio feed into your podware. And remember, she welcomes feedback.

Related: Googling literature: The debate becomes public, in the New York Times.