If Humpty Dumpty’s arguments about who controls the meaning of words, the Red Queen’s “jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day,” and the White Knight’s earnest yet ridiculous inventions made you grin, you’ll love the absurd logic of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams turns semantics and reason on their heads—whether it’s the Infinite Improbability Drive, Vogon poetry as a weapon, or Marvin the paranoid android’s deadpan asides—delivering the same sparkling, tongue-in-cheek delight that made Alice’s mirror-world so much fun.

If you loved how Alice wanders a chessboard land where bread-and-butterflies flutter and the Red and White Queens twist logic into knots, The Phantom Tollbooth offers a kindred adventure. Milo drives to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, argues with watchdog Tock about wasting time, and literally jumps to the Island of Conclusions. Like Alice’s debates with Tweedledum and Tweedledee or Humpty’s semantic gymnastics, every stop in Milo’s journey turns wordplay into landscape and law.

If Alice’s step through the mirror into a world of living chess pieces, talking flowers, and backwards logic captivated you, Dorothy’s whirlwind trip to Oz will feel like a welcome echo. From the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, she meets the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion—companions as memorable as the White Knight and the feuding Lion and Unicorn—on a quest whose rules are as delightfully peculiar as anything the Red Queen might decree.

If the mirror-world’s send-ups of etiquette and authority—like queens who argue in circles and nursery-rhyme royalty who fight over crowns—tickled you, Swift’s voyages will hit the same nerve. Gulliver’s encounters in Lilliput and Laputa skewer politics, pedantry, and pride with the kind of straight-faced absurdity that powers the Red Queen’s edicts and Humpty Dumpty’s sovereign definitions.

If you enjoyed Alice’s square-by-square progress—meeting the Gnat, the White Queen, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, then the White Knight in a chain of lively episodes—Haroun and the Sea of Stories offers a similarly sparkling journey. Haroun teams up with Iff the Water Genie and Butt the Hoopoe, sails the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and faces the shadowy Chupwalas, each chapter a vivid set piece that charms like Alice’s stopovers while building to a heartfelt payoff.