The eighty-fifth book: #129 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The eighty-sixth book: #142 Alice Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll
After a few more books in order, I got a Lewis Carroll in to break up my Austens. I'm grouping the two Alice stories together as they are both fairly short and feel linked enough. They're technically the story of Alice as she explores these weird places, but its main focus is that it shows us these bizarre vignettes, situations with outlandish fantasy characters (most of which you know by now) that Alice travels between. Some carry from one to the other, but there's very little throughline to Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass has Alice travel to the other side of a chess board, but aside from the Queens' occasional appearances, each square is its own story and place.
That's not a criticism, it's a view into one man's imagination, clearly inspired by the people and toys around him as he was telling these stories. I don't know the exact inspirations behind them, but it feels like he put in jokes into short stories that he collected and built a single story out of, with some crossover characters and references at the end. It's a bit more structured in Through the Looking-Glass, but seeing these different situations is the most appealing. It occasionally makes you think, but at the same time, there's not much point to trying to find too much meaning in it - and here, that's just fine.