While teaching Alice's Adventures in Wonderland this week in ENG 370: History of Children's Literature, I am 
Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Norton, 1999)encouraging the students to read an interview I did with Martin Gardner (link is to .pdf). Gardner is, in many ways, a modern twin to Lewis Carroll. He's a mathematician, puzzle-maker as well as a story teller and magician. The interview that I wrote for Five Owls, a periodical on children's literature, focused on Gardner's classic books: The Annotated Alice, More Annotated Alice, and Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.
In the interview, Gardner revealed that he didn't initially like the Alice books because when he was young he found them scary. When he was in his 20s and a mathematician, he picked up Alice's Adventures because he was familiar with Carroll as a mathematician. Curiously, Gardner, like Carroll, also became famous for writing puzzles and math games for children. Gardner also wrote a famous, long-running column for Scientific American and is the author of more than 70 books, including some fantasies for children. And was a genuinely nice person to interview.
Added March 2: Entertainment Weekly as a piece about Alice references in Lost.