Yeah, Sy.
Sometimes history is awesome.Anyway, it's all kind of a long story, really. Lewis Carroll has become something of a "hobby" for me. For a large portion of my life I thought he was just some weirdo, having never truly studied him in any meaningful way. I heard he was a pedophile, a drug addict, a lunatic... all sorts of stuff. But I'd never really paid much attention or bothered to look for myself. I'd read the Alice stories, but that was about it. Much later, when I was working for United Airlines before the whole 9/11 thing happened, I decided to read a biography on him. I picked up
this book by Morten Cohen, read it in about two days, and for some reason just became totally fascinated by the man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson being his real name. I discovered a great deal more of his writing, a lot of which was stuff I enjoyed a lot more than I'd have expected to, and while he's a really interesting man by any standard, he is even more so when you've got a total misconception of him from the start. I began to read more of his stuff, to look into some of his other work (he was an Oxford don who did a lot of work with mathematics, and he was also one of the earlier people to do photography really worthy of note -- I have a book of that as well), and began to get a lot more books about him. I have a pretty big collection now.
Anyway, this story is pretty much his swan song. These two books are more or less the last significant thing he wrote, and as someone who identifies with him a lot on a lot of levels (which is odd in many ways, too, being that he loved children so much and I like to throw them on the BBQ), the books are amazing because there's just so much of *him* in them. He's more in those two books than most of his other work, as he sort of wrote "himself" in as a character. This was when he was getting older and the works are very personal because of it, contrasting the youth of the children and younger adult characters with his own advancing age, so finally getting around to reading them was just a joy for me after I'd spent so much time learning about him. It was almost like getting to meet someone after sending letters to them for a while. Something like that. Anyway, I really liked the books on top of that and they demonstrate a lot of the odd things I share with him in terms of life philosophy and religion (though there is much I feel he was wrong about), and it deals with some concepts I've explored in my own writing and music, at least thematically, sometimes literally. All in all, I just fell in love with the books and have been hoping to own a first edition of each for some time. It seems I'm going to get the chance after all.
