How to approach Lewis Carroll's Alice books- For dummies, and Let's play Lewis Carroll's Word Ladder game

Going around the internet, I'm baffled by many readers' response to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. How can they read those books that way? I mean, do they need guidelines? 
Let me help. 
- Treat them as fairy tales. 
- Don't expect a plot; don't cling to assumptions about what (Victorian) novels should do or shouldn't do. 
- Don't look for an explicit moral message; don't expect Alice to learn something (Who are you? The Duchess? "And the moral of that is..."). 
- Focus on language; enjoy the logic games, word play, puns... and the characters; just have fun. 
- Don't expect the books to be exactly like the adaptations and resent them for not being so. 
- Separate Lewis Carroll from Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, i.e. get rid of all the theories about his sexuality.
What do I see when reading the Alice books? I see a logical, mathematical mind combined with a rich imagination and love of the grotesque. Being a logician that is also interested in language, Lewis Carroll notices, and jokes about, the illogicality of the English language. And he's an inventor- he makes up words and creates worlds and invents games. What a pity it is to read books as brilliant and delightful and complex as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and see them as nothing but products of a diseased mind! Sigh. 




Come to think of it, these are of course "rules" for approaching novels in general, not just Lewis Carroll's Alice books. 




______________________________________________

For fun: 
Do you know that Lewis Carroll invented the Word Ladder game? 
Examples: 
- CAT 
COT 
DOT
DOG
- HEAD 
HEAL 
TEAL 
TELL 
TALL 
TAIL
(My solution, btw, is different from his: 
HEAD 
HEAL 
HELL 
HALL 
TALL 
TAIL)
- APE 
APT 
OPT 
OAT 
MAT 
MAN 
The Wikipedia page quotes Nabokov as saying "some of my records are: hate—love in three, lass—male in four, and live—dead in five (with "lend" in the middle)". 
From HATE to LOVE. The solution I got: 
HATE 
GATE 
GAVE 
GIVE 
LIVE 
LOVE 
Too long. Shorter: 
HATE 
HAVE 
CAVE 
COVE 
LOVE 
Finally I came up with something shorter: 
HATE 
LATE 
LAVE 
LOVE 
Not bad, hmm? 
How do you go from LIVE to DEAD? 
The solution I got was: 
LIVE 
LINE 
LANE 
LAND 
LEND 
LEAD 
DEAD 
Too long, I think. A bit googling gave me another solution: 
LIVE 
LOVE 
LORE 
LORD 
LOAD 
LEAD 
DEAD 
The number of steps is the same. Could you find a shorter solution?