We're all mad here. Specifically, Eleanor is mad about people saying Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on drugs and Alasdair is mad about the Tim Burton film being rubbish. For this episode, we read Carroll's enormously influential 1865 novel, and we asked: do books actually need plots? Or will some 160 year-old puns do?

Content Warning: We make allusions to the controversy surrounding Carroll, without going into detail.

Sickly, spoiled and terrified of the outside world, Eleanor and Alasdair read The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's kidlit classic is the story of an obnoxious little girl who goes to Yorkshire on her gap year and really finds herself. Is the book an ode to the healing powers of nature? Or is it a hippy-fascist self-help tract? And which film adaptation is best — the one Eleanor watched as a kid, or the steampunk Mormon version?

Content Warning: References to ableism and British colonialism. And we inaccurately describe Yorkshire as "a big county" when it is, in fact, four counties.

Like a pair of creepy twins, Eleanor and Alasdair venture up Alderley Edge to meet the Wizard. We read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner's 1960 folk horror classic. Is it too scary for kids, or just too scary for Alasdair? Did Eleanor really fall asleep at the end of the audiobook? And what, exactly, does a rustic Cheshire accent sound like?

We simply don't know.