Things I'll Love Forever: Alice in Wonderland

The story that made Lewis Carroll famous is now used as a symbol of drug culture and general, unchained mind-screwery, but, really, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and its follow-up, Through the Looking Glass) are fantastic children's books in their own right.

• Carroll's stories often get unfairly saddled with an... unsavory reputation. While there's certainly something slightly sinister regarding Carroll's fascination with children, at heart the Alice stories are simply good, enjoyable children's stories, complete with fantastic scenes and great leaps in logic.
• Speaking of leaps in logic, the Alice stories are effective criticisms and satires of traditional logical thinking. In fact, it's this rebellion against logic that inspires so much of the nonsense in the books (and not any illicit substances).
• While I maintain that the Alice stories are inherently innocent, the images and characters in those stories lend themselves very well to darker interpretations - some of which will find place in my own fiction down the road. The darker elements of Alice have been successfully incorporated into superhero fiction and video games (but not, to my knowledge, in movies).
• While Through the Looking Glass is easily the weaker of the two books, the poem "Jabberwocky" remains one of the greatest nonsense poems of all time, so much so that it's actually transcended nonsense into... sense (some of the words of the poem, like "chortled," are legitimate words in their own right now).
• Also, Alice's exchange with Humpty Dumpty may be the greatest thing ever ("'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less'").

Children's literature continues to inspire me well into my alleged adulthood, and none so much as Alice in Wonderland. For that, I'll love these books forever.