Alice's Adventures  in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Audio book) Puffin Audio Books £6.80

We all work in the same office and meet once a month in the café at work. We don't have a set structure to our meetings- everyone just chips in whenever they have a contribution to make. We decide at the end of each meeting what we are going to read next.

We have previously read:

OXYGEN by Andrew Miller - Many of the group were impressed with Andrew Miller's skill as a novelist but others simply couldn't see what the fuss was about.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck- Some of us found this book impossible to read and stopped half way through.

HOTEL WORLD by Ali Smith- This book split the group in two with half of us loving it and reading it again and again and the other half unable to read it at all.

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen - This was unanimously loved by the group with everyone recognising someone they knew in the characters.

This month we listened to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and compared it to The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner Penguin Books £9.99.

Everyone felt they were familiar with the book and reading it evoked many childhood memories. Reading the book was a completely different experience to listening to it. The Annotated Alice included side notes which were helpful and compelling but impossible to ignore and a result they distracted from the flow of the story.

Melissa thought the different voices used for the characters in the audio book were very effective and brought the characters to life. She was surprised to learn that only two actors were responsible for the wide range of voices. Julie felt that Carroll's puns and word-play came across much better in the audio tape as you could sometimes pass over them on the page. A few of us were unimpressed by the musical score that occasionally accompanied the narrative, finding it grating and unnecessary.

Zelda was impressed by the quantity of original ideas crammed into the book. The book has influenced so many other writers, including Jack Kerouac and Douglas Adams, and we could see why. The book was successful in Carroll's lifetime and wasn't just intended for children as it contained many references to new scientific and mathematical discoveries of the time. We then tried to decide which age group Alice falls into. Liz had already read Alice by the time she was eight-years-old and we thought this was around the average age for the books. We felt it was aimed at little girls and then commented childhood reading often divides into books aimed at either girls or boys.

Some of us thought that the book was rather frightening at times and wondered how it would have been perceived by Victorian children. We then said that an element of something darker has to be included in children's stories otherwise they would become too twee. Victorian children were not exposed to the horror movies that today's children are now immune to. Rachel had nightmares as a child about a pack of cards and thinks this was influenced by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We then remembered that children's fairy tales at that time were very menacing - Grimm's fairly tales were horrifying and extremely moralistic. In the introduction to this book Martin Gardner says that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was one of the first children's stories not to include strict morals. Some of us disagreed about this because at times Carroll's authorial voice comes through strongly.

We briefly discussed the accusations that Lewis Carroll was a paedophile. He took many  photographs of  little girls and he didn't like little boys. This brought to mind other strange children's authors, including Roald Dahl and A.A. Milne.

We all loved the original illustrations in the book and thought that they added to the book's charm.

Then some of the group then wrote their thoughts on the audio book and their childhood reading.

Carly:  I loved the Narnia tales when I was young and was VERY into the famous five and secret seven.

Rachel: I thought the audio tape worked well, although I think to have your parents read it to you would be even better.  The pictures are also vital to the book, so you'd miss out if you only had the tape.  I think all children should use the book first, and then listen to the tape afterwards, to get the best of both worlds.

I read anything I could lay my hands on as a child (I suppose that's why I ended up working in publishing!).  Alice is important because of the shared experience - it's such an influential book that almost everybody has read it, and you will see references to it everywhere.  I was always a big fan of anything that would take me into another world - The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton sticks in my mind as being v. exciting.  But the point about Alice is that you can read it at any age, and it will always mean something different, but always mean something.