Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
"What sorts of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask.
"Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone. "For instance, now," she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, "there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished, and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday, and of course the crime comes last of all."
"Suppose he never commits the crime?" said Alice.
"That would be all the better, wouldn't it?" the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.
Alice felt there was no denying that. "Of course it would be all the better," she said. "But it wouldn't be all the better his being punished."
"You're wrong there, at any rate," said the Queen. "Were you ever punished?"
"Only for faults," said Alice.
"And you were all the better for it, I know!" the Queen said triumphantly.
"Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for," said Alice, "that makes all the difference."
"But if you hadn't done them," the Queen said, "that would have been better still. Better, and better, and better!"
Ay-ay-ay, this is a difficult one to review. A book everyone has read and nobody really understands. Except the kids. Yes, except them.
I read and loved it decades ago, when I was a kid, and knew all about it. I remember going back to the book (a double volume with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, loving the text, loving the pictures by John Tenniel, shuddering at the attempts to adapt them to the screen, which always got them all WRONG, especially the Disney movie and the even worse all-star live production they showed on television.
Looking Glass is a more coherent story than Wonderland, tied up with a sort of chess game in which Alice begins as a pawn and advances from the second to the eighth square to become a queen, each square being a distinct place. Along the way, we encounter the Red Queen, who has to run as fast as she can to stay in the same place; the White Queen, who believes six impossible things before breakfast, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the walrus and the carpenter, and the Jabberwock.
Besides the chess, there's a theme of backwardness stemming from being on the other side of a mirror, and a general philosophical undercurrent that makes the story readable for adults as well as children. Unlike, say, The Little Prince, this layer isn't defined, and may not have been intentional. Carroll was a mathematician who reportedly tossed off the Alice books stream-of-consciously, the way Coleridge did Kubla Kahn, and any deeper meaning may have been in Carroll's subconsciousness.
Or maybe the whole thing is just delightful nonsense. Everyone with children should read it to them, and anyone without children should read it at least once while stoned.