Book Cover
Title The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art W.W. Denslow
Publisher CRW Publishing - 2009
First Printing 1900
Book Cover
Title The Marvelous Land of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1904
Book Cover
Title Ozma of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1907
Book Cover
Title Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1908
Book Cover
Title The Road to Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1909
Book Cover
Title The Emerald City of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1910
Book Cover
Title The Patchwork Girl of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1913
Book Cover
Title Little Wizard Stories of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1913
Book Cover
Title Tik-Tok Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1914
Book Cover
Title The Scarecrow of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1915
Book Cover
Title Rinkitink in Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1916
Book Cover
Title The Lost Princess of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1917
Book Cover
Title The Tin Woodman of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1918
Book Cover
Title The Magic of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1919
Book Cover
Title Glinda of Oz
Author L. Frank Baum
Cover Art ---
Publisher ---
First Printing 1920
Category Children
Warnings None
Main Characters Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, Wooden Sawhorse, Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, Ozma, Glinda, Tik-Tok, Eureka, Shaggy Man, Betsy, the Gnome King, Polychrome, and many more
Main Elements Wizards, witches, anthropomorphism, and all kinds of bizarre creatures
Website ---




Click to read the summaryThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Marvelous Land of Oz

Click to read the summaryOzma of Oz

Click to read the summaryDorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Road to Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Emerald City of Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Patchwork Girl of Oz

Click to read the summaryLittle Wizard Stories of Oz

Click to read the summaryTik-Tok of Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Scarecrow of Oz

Click to read the summaryRinkitink in Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Lost Princess of Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Tin Woodman of Oz

Click to read the summaryThe Magic of Oz

Click to read the summaryGlinda of Oz




I'm pretty sure I read The Wizard of Oz as a kid, but I don't really remember doing so. On the other hand I've seen the movie several times and almost know it by heart. So as I've lately been trying to catch up on all the kids classics I missed reading when I was younger, decided I should make sure I've read this one too.

The introduction was actually quite interesting but Baum wanted people to understand that while this is a fairy tale, he felt that kids spent enough time learning about morals and being good at home and at school that they needed a story with no underlying lesson to teach. So this isn't a story where if you are good, good things happen, and if you are bad, bad things happen. This is just a story of a girl that gets swept up by a tornado and dropped into the magical land of Oz. Whether he tried to weave in more allegorical themes into the story as well is entirely plausible, however, ultimately I think a person can read something into anything, even if it wasn't there to begin with. Sometimes a story is just a story!

Now I'm pretty sure every kid has seen the movie. Which is why when I read the book I was surprised there were no ruby slippers, they were made of silver! Actually there are a lot of differences, which one kind of expects when a book is made into a movie, but because the movie is such a classic it almost feels as if it is the book that made the changes, and not the other way around. But no worries, the book is still a familiar place even if every now and then you find yourself thinking, "Wait, that's not how it goes...". I think the most interesting part is the secret behind the colour of the Emerald City. I'll let you read it yourself to find out what that is.

Also interesting is that in the book, Oz wasn't a dream caused by a bump on the head. It was a real place, and Baum wrote a series of Oz books following this one. Which is good, because while Dorothy and her friends encountered many of the peoples in the land of Oz, there were many that were mentioned but we never met.

January 2020

This year I decided to "complete series I started" and since Baum was alphabetically high on the list, and the books are free to download, I put them all on my eReader and starting working my way through them.

I was a little shocked at how cruel the characters were to each other, sure, it's a childish cruelty, but still, each character keeps pointing out their own flaws and everyone agrees, yes you are stupid/slow/whatever, and then the same character says mean things to the others. It is also often ridiculous (a successful revolt using only knitting needles as weapons...of course girls would only use those, they can't even get knives from the kitchen?) and the dialog is very stilted. I try to keep in mind when they were written, think of the violence in the early Disney cartoons for example, it was just the style of kids entertainment then. And as mentioned above, Baum wasn't out to teach kids anything, he just wanted them to have fun. And I guess for a certain age group that's so...but as an adult there is little of interest in these books, in fact they are kind of bad (as I understand it Baum didn't even want to write them but needed the money or was pressured, which happens to several authors such as Herbert and his Dune, and often shows). But they are short and quick reads so I'll see if I can get through the whole set of 14 of them. Must admit as I get further and further along I find the writing to get worse and worse, it's all so stilted, like a not very good amateur author (I try to keep in mind both the target audience and when it was written) but if someone wrote these stories now I'm not sure they'd have a ghost of a chance to get published. However, I'm sure kids will still enjoy the quirkiness of these stories, and the bizarre characters will inspire their imaginations, they won't care about the quality of the writing.

Also...I finally get the origin of that terryfing Oz movie sequel, you know the one where Dorothy goes through electroshock treatment (not in the book, she just gets to be shipwrecked back in Oz) and those creepy wheelies that squeak as they roll about, a sorceress that can change her head and has a fondness for mirrors, and even TikTok was kind of scary. That movie gave me nightmares, not sure what the makers of that movie thought, making that for kids. The books are not at all scary at least, every creepy evil thing turns out to be weak and no dangerous.

Anyway, as I write this paragraph I'm about at the halfway point and they get pretty repetive and all are sort of merging and mixing together in my head. And Baum is far from consistent in his storytelling, changing events from one book to the next, not that kids would care all that much. In fact one of the things I'm enjoying the most are his introductions to each book, you get an insight into his love/hate relationship with this world he created. There are times when he seems thrilled to be writing another Oz book, and other times he writes that "this is probably the last Oz book". He even had Ozma encase Oz in an impenetrable shield so no one could venture into Oz and no information could get out, basically pulling an Arthur Conan Doyle and killing everyone off in a more gentle way. But his need for money and his many fans forced him to find a loophole in his own designs (thanks to Marconi and the invention of the wireless) so he could keep on writing more. And this impenetrable shield exposes more and more holes as time goes on, in fact I think he almost forgot it was there for the convience of the story, pulling in more and more characters from the outside. He also falls into the trap that Piers Anthony did with Xanth, he basically wrote books that were nothing but a collection of ideas and puns sent in my his readers, so that there was no real plot or meaningful connection between events, just an excuse to make some goofy jokes one after another. But I'll keep going I think, I made it this far, I might as well finish!

Talking of finishing, apparently the series was so popular that after Baum stopped writing, others picked up where he left off, such that the Oz books number around 50 in total. Not sure I'm going to consider those as "completing the series", after all I don't know if Baum's estate even allowed it, or like in the case of Conan, there was a snaffu with the copyrights that allowed others in when he otherwise wouldn't have allowed it. But some of those books are available free on Gutenberg and on OpenLibrary so who knows, maybe I won't be able to resist reading the ones I can get my hands on for free, definitely won't pay for them. And of course the modern retellings like Maguire's Wicked (definitely want to read that one), or Dorothy Must Die (not so sure about that, sounds gruesome).

May 2020

It took about 4.5 months to read the whole series. Of course with Covid I haven't been using my ereader as much, I have to purposefully pick it up and read a bit since I'm no longer using public transit while I work from home. But I did it, I read them all, even the hard to find Little Wizard Stories of Oz which came up on Project Gutenberg.

On the whole, I still found most of the characters cruel, even in a world where everyone is supposed to be happy and friendly and no one gets hurt (the rules of the world change dramatically as the series evolves), most of the characters go around saying how wonderful they are (I have the best brains! is pretty common one) and how dumb or ugly everyone else is, but oh, well they can still be friends even if are just lowly meat bodies. It didn't seem to be kind the kind of role models I'd want my kids to read about! But kids view the world differently, and times have changed as well, so was an interesting exercise even if I'll probably forget most of the stories in a year or two. At least I'll know that not only was it not just a movie, but it was a whole collection of books.




Posted: March 2011

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