Curiouser and Curiouser: The Puzzles of Lewis Carroll
Tumble down the rabbit hole, or better yet, slip through the looking glass, and find yourself in a world where logic wears a waistcoat and imagination takes tea with arithmetic. Here, in a book bursting with full-color illustrations, is a grand celebration of that most curious of puzzle-makers, Mr. Lewis Carroll himself.
This carefully gathered collection offers the very best conundrums from the pen that gave us Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Not one is out of place, and not one is the least bit sensible, which is precisely the point.
Mr. Carroll was a mathematician by trade, but a puzzler by heart. He invented the word ladder, adored acrostics and riddles, and he slipped twisty questions of math and logic into his two most famous tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Inside you will find a delightfully muddled feast of mind-benders: doublets, those clever word ladders, and their grander cousins the syzygies; mirror writing, which must be read backward, or in a mirror, or possibly both; and arithmetical croquet. There are also riddles, the very riddles that left Alice scratching her head, and which may well leave you scratching yours.
So pour yourself a cup of tea (it is always tea-time somewhere), sharpen your wits, and begin. You may need to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but we promise that solving a few of these puzzles will be easier. Probably.