The Alchemist or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

  I really do not know what to write about.  Both stories really caught my attention.  I loved both of them.  What I liked about Alice was that there was a lot of symbolism in the book.  The growing and shrinking of Alice signified the ups and downs of the transition into adult and the loss of childhood innocence. The Garden Alice was searching for could symbolize a paradise and similar to the Garden of Eden.
  In The Alchemist, the whole time I was reading I was intrigued with the idea of Alchemy and the concept of equivalent exchange ( Law of Equivalent Exchange). Alchemy is basically a philosophy of, I guess you could say, the cosmos or mankind's place in the world.  It's to reach a certain path of spiritual  purification and transformation of the person to obtain ultimate wisdom and the expansion of the consciousness.  I thought of the idea of equivalent exchange because it seemed that Santiago was always sacrificing or giving up something and then something better came to him in return.
  So if I were to do Alice my research question would have to be: "How does Carroll's use of symbolism in Alice reflect the transition of growing up in reality?"
  And if I were to do The Alchemist my research question would have to be: " What does the role of equivalent exchange play in Santiago's journey to complete his personal legend?"