Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) & Through the Looking Glass (1872). New York: Signet, 2000.

I've read these books about ten times, beginning back when I was still in elementary school. Fourth grade, I think. I remember flipping through the book—comprising both novels, as this edition does—and seeing chapter XI in TTLG, the one titled "Waking", which in its entirety reads: "——and it really was a kitten after all." I remember thinking that a half-sentence chapter was the coolest thing ever.

Years after leaving Hutchison Elementary, I returned and chatted with the librarian, who was still there, helping kids find books, and on a stroll through the stacks which came up to mid-chest I found the edition I'd read years before. Still tucked inside the back cover was the checkout card on which I wrote "Dusty M"—twice. By now, the school had switched over to an electronic system. I asked if I could keep the card. I still have it today, serving as a bookmark in my copy of Gardner's Annotated Alice.

This time reading was strange in that I knew I was going to write a term paper on the novels, and so I read with a pencil and tossed theories and ideas around in my head as I followed Alice every step of the way I knew so fully. What began interesting me was the idea of animal hostility and gentility. Those Wonderlanders are so mean to Alice, so short-tempered and strict. But reading through TTLG, I think I'm more interested in hybridity in the Alice books. It's everywhere, really. Any creature that appears as an animal but walks on two legs and speaks English is a hybrid. The cards that form croquet arches are hybrids. Alice, when she grows tall enough that her neck extends and gets floppy, is accused of being a serpent, thus forming her into a hybrid. Even the language itself, with its nonsense words and portmanteaus (slithy, chortle, mimsy), is hybridized.

There's something to say that links the hybrids in Carroll's books with Darwin's finches and sexual selection. But what? But what?