Joyce Carol Oates, whose latest novel is Carthage, says that the book that changed her life was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, a combination of the two classics in one volume.
Her grandmother Blanche Morgenstern gave her the volume for her ninth birthday in 1947, Oates writes in the June/Jul 2014 issues of AARP The Magazine.
From those two books “have sprung not only much of my enthusiasm for writing, but also my sense of the world as an indecipherable, essentially absurd but fascinating spectacle.”