Catch some of the trailers. THere’s so much more to Baum’s worlds than has ever made it to the screen, and CGI can do some magic on this one… to be released in March.
A movie coming that may be worth it…Oz, the Great and Powerful…
by CJ | Nov 20, 2012 | Journal | 14 comments
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I was always so creeped out by the flying monkeys that I wasn’t interested in reading any of the follow-on books until I got into college. Strange isn’t it that the “adults” can learn to appreciate the “children’s” books, but children can be so stubborn about “Do Not Want!”
I read them ALL as a child. My father had them from when he was a child.
I’m heartened by seeing the trailer. The graphic design is straight from the graphic design of the old books.
When I broke my arm, at 7, it was a very nasty break, requiring a bed stay, traction, you name it, and I read through the children’s library, so the librarian, sympathetic to my father’s request, let me have books from the basement collection of the old, fragile, and leatherbound…on instructions to turn the pages really carefully. I met Kipling that way, and also Frank Baum. I read my way through the Oz books, and was absolutely transported by the weird, the horrific, and the outrageously funny all together. I think I was just the right age, and certainly in the right frame of mind. My birthday present that year was my very own copy of Lucky Bucky in Oz, complete with original illustrations—and I still have that book. It involved a wooden whale, pie-rats, a flamingo who thought it was a bellows, and a very handsome hero. How could it miss? I tried and tried to draw Ozma in the original style—the art just amazed me.
And the librarian, impressed that I had gone through the appropriate books in the downstairs, let me have an adult card, which was heaven on earth. I met all sorts of books—I was a little disappointed there were no pictures, but novels about Richard I and, my favorite guilty pleasure, Conan—which I could only check out when the older librarian had gone to the restroom and the younger was at the desk—just absolutely whisked me out of town and off on a magic carpet to everywhere.
“Alice in Wonderland” is based on some surprizingly abstract mathematics. Or should I say “surprizingly based on abstract mathematics”? 😉
“Off ran Dingo — Yellow-Dog Dingo — always hungry, grinning like a coal scuttle.” Just So Stories FTW! I was fortunate in that I had very sympathetic librarians who never got in my way about anything I tried to read, although I didn’t really finish gnawing my way through our kids’ section until age 10 or so. We had a surprisingly sophisticated collection of science fiction short stories in the J section, including one by Anne McCaffrey that I swear had a younger version of one of her primary Dragonriders, but was reissued later with the main character renamed. Those collections were my introduction to Anthony, and Scott and Emma, and Telzey, and a house with 5 remaining spots of paint on an exterior wall…
I was 13ish when I first met Andre Norton. I still remember how fascinated I was with her heros who could communicate with animals, and the epic journeys they were forced into making for one reason or another. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit any of the good stuff (Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Alice, Oz) until I was in college.
That sounds like a good movie. The design work lately is really something.
Books, libraries, bookstores. I was a bookish kid by nature. Early reading through the children’s library section, checking out a few adult books on my parents’ card, graduating to an adult card when I was old enough.
People like Kipling, or Andre Norton, Heinlein’s “juveniles” (which weren’t so juvenile, really), Alan Dean Foster, many others. As a kid, there were about three series of really top notch juvenile books on science topics. Dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts especially grabbed my interest. But things like the solar system and calendar too. I still have some of those. (LOL, one is actually *shown* in one of the Godzilla movies.)
I gravitated towards science fiction and fantasy early on. I missed out on some of the “clsasic literature” books, particularly antiquities, because I liked SF&F more. But even so, I read more than most of my classmates.
Three books about Star Trek fed an early ambition, wanting to be a writer. The two books on The World of Star Trek, The Making of Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry and Stephen E. Whitfield, and David Gerrold’s book on the Making of The Trouble With Tribbles. I wish they’d reprint those. They still have very good advice. As a boy, I wore off the cover of Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Compendium.
And…early on, I got a book called Man Must Speak. I think I was only 11 or 12, and the book was more geared to adults. But I liked it. I had an early interest in writing and the alphabet and languages, and had my first foreign language class in junior high. I’m not sure what clued my parents in to it, but they saw the potential when I was still too young to know. Thanks to that, languages are one of my lifelong loves. (Oh, and if Miss McAdams or Miss Seegar are still around somewhere, I owe them a big thank you.) (My college French prof, Dr. Hunting, was a Frenchwoman who’d married an English speaker. Eccentric lady, but she loved teaching French.) A book I read in junior high was, The Romance of Writing, by Gordon Irwin. The book covered a little bit of everything, except Devanagari. I wish it would get republished. He had an admiration for the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans which showed in how he wrote about them. I would’ve been first learning Spanish, French, and a little German at the time, so the book fit right in.
It was early college, when I was desperate for a study break, anything that was good scifi, and a buddy loaned me Pride of Chanur and Downbelow Station. I’m very grateful for that. I went through DBS in a weekend. I don’t think I did anything else, and I stayed up all one night. I’ve been hooked ever since. When I learned CJC did indeed have a languages and classical studies background, it went a long way to explaining why her (your) books spoke to me so well.
A love of books and a love of learning, a curiosity about life, are probably some of the greatest gifts, besides a love of people, one could possibly get.
Happy Thanksgiving, All!
I had a wonderful French teacher who spoke with a classic Parisian accent and my mother thought it was an absolute hoot because otherwise she spoke pure Bronx.
As much as I’ve always been a big reader I don’t think I ever read the Oz books. Odd hole that. I remember a set of books I had as a kid — Reader’s Digest collection of things like The Huntchback of Notre Dame and of course they were all condensed versions, but I sure went thru them and there were constant trips to the library, but no particular favorites except Margaret Henry’s books. So other than her’s, Dr. Suess, and the Wind in the Willows books I think I missed most of the kid books. One summer when I was in high school I volunteered at the library summer reading program that was geared towards younger kids. Lots of down time with that and I ended up devoured kids books — Pippi Longstockings, Paddington Bear, Narnia and some other wonderful kid’s fantasy, but no OZ. Might have to explore that now. Once I found Heinlein’s Stranger when I was 15, and then CJ’s Ivrel a few years later it was sci-fi/fantasy for the next 30 years until I branched out into some mysteries over the last 10 years. But I think I need to fill in a big hole in my literary experiences. They should all be available in Guttenberg, wouldn’t you think?
ALas, one of the Oz books they don’t have is Lucky Bucky in Oz…sigh. Who knows? I may have the only extant copy. Though I doubt it.
The MobileRead Library has an epub omnibus of Baum’s Oz books: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49605
It contains the 14 books Baum wrote, and some short stories.
Bucky in Oz was written by John R. Neill, who died in 1943, twenty years too late to be included in Project Gutenberg. Of course, his work is in the Public Domain in Canada, I think.
It seems a lot of people wrote authorized Oz books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books But I think only Baum’s are PD in the US.
A search at ABEbooks shows 19 copies for sale, ranging from about $25 for a 199x reprint up to $250 for a 1942 edition… 😀
Ain’t the Internet wonnerful?
Back in 2009, Mari Ness, a blogger at TOR.com, did a “re-read” of all the OZ books. All her posts and comments have been archived here: http://www.tor.com/features/series/oz-reread . I thought I’d read most of the books when I was growing up but I learned a lot from Mari. (Baum was sent to high school in my home town, Peekskill, NY and there’s a long-standing rumor/wish that the Yellow Brick Road begins and ends in Peekskill…so my friends and I read rather more Baum than was typical in the 50s)
I wondered if that wasn’t a reason. It did seem to me that there might have been another name on the cover. They’re wonderfully mad books.
I poked around on Amazon and found a complete works (15, but no Lucky Bucky in the mix) — with the original illustrations! Cost is $.99. Got it but no idea when I’ll get around to reading them — reading Jane’s stuff right now.