A Second Time Through

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I am Shane Timson from Colby, Kansas. We’ve all heard the phrase “down the rabbit hole” or maybe you’ve said, “I went down the rabbit hole.” The other day I was online looking up things and pretty soon I was looking up things that had nothing to do with anything else. What was supposed to be 10 or 15 minutes turned out to be a whole afternoon.

We get this iconic phrase “down the rabbit hole” from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland book one. That is the title of Chapter One - Down the Rabbit Hole. They start out on a riverbank. Alice’s sister is reading a pictureless book. She thinks that’s silly that anybody would read a book without pictures. Then she spots a rabbit, and she quickly determines the rabbit is more interesting than her sister. So, she follows the rabbit down the hole.

She falls for what seems an eternity. When she finally hits the ground with a thud, she’s at first startled. Where is she? What is this place? She slowly starts to meet other creatures that lead her down different pathways. Each pathway is a new adventure.

If you’re looking for something to be connected, they’re not as far as I could tell. Each adventure is its own thing, not connected to the previous one. It seems just as quick as one chapter begins, it ends. What just happened? I was disappointed.

I was until I remembered the title of the fall reading series through the eyes of a child . I had read this book through the eyes of an adult. I totally missed it, so I went back and read it again. Reading it the second time was much more enjoyable because I wasn’t trying to connect anything. I was simply just trying to be in each adventure to see where it would take me.

Maybe that’s the problem as smart as Alice is -- she’s always figuring various math equations in her head -- but she wasn’t at all concerned these adventures not really making sense She just seemed to enjoy each adventure and take it all in. And maybe that’s the problem with adults. We’re always trying to figure everything out. We try to figure out where things are and how this is going to play into the next event or whether it makes sense.

Maybe we need to get what we can out of it. Just simply enjoy the day, just take it for what it is, not trying to figure out how one thing is going to play into this event.

Yes, this book can be very frustrating. If you read but read it through the eyes of a child and put aside your adult thinking, it’s a very enjoyable book. Reading it through the eyes of an adult, I can see how this book is a classic and how it has held up through the test of time.

I truly enjoyed this book when I read it the second time. This book is kind of like a dream. We’ve all had dreams that made absolutely no sense You wake up going, “What?” Well, that is exactly what Allison Wonderland is. You will go, “What was that?” but you’ll want to read it again.