10 Novels I Read in 2017

Happy New Year, everyone! Before I get into the last year in movies, I want to talk about some books I read this year. These aren't all from 2017; they're just ones that I read for the first time last year. And they're not the whole list of books I read, either.

According to my Goodreads log, I read 34 books last year. I'd set a goal for myself of 24, so I met that, even when you consider that six of those "books" were short stories. Thirteen were graphic novels or collections of comics (a lot of Tarzan, but also some '70s Batman and Marvel collections). Those totally count, but I'm not talking about them here. I also left off some re-reads (a couple of Burroughs' Tarzan novels) and a couple of books that would need more space to write about than I want to give here (those are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Zorro: The Complete Pulp Adventures, Volume 1). If you're doing the math, that's a total of 23, but I'm going to talk about the 24th when I talk about one of the ten below, because they're thematically linked.

What's left are ten novels that I read in 2017, listed from least to most favorite.

10. On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers



You know I like pirates, right? I may have mentioned it. And Tim Powers' book was either an inspiration for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie or shared enough common elements with it that Disney paid for the title. Since I was disappointed by that movie, I thought I should read the book and get the original take on Blackbeard's search for the Fountain of Youth. Sadly, this was disappointing, too.

It's very well written in terms of craft. Powers knows how to create captivating characters and give them distinct voices. He's also great at period details and introducing a compelling mystery. Where the book lost me though was halfway through when the story's magical elements fully took over the nautical adventure. At that point, it becomes full-on fantasy and the villains might as well be wearing pointy hats with stars. It was also grating to realize that the one female character is actually nothing but a MacGuffin for the hero to chase after and try to protect. This is the only book on the list that I didn't finish.

9. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad



This was another disappointing book and a couple of things contributed to that. One was that its psychological terror had been hyped beyond its ability to deliver. But the other is that Apocalypse Now (which is a loose adaptation of it) had also raised my expectations about how disturbed I would be. The novel never got there for me.

Nor did it answer any of the questions I had about Kurtz or what went wrong with him. That's probably the point, but I was still looking for some insight that the book doesn't deliver. There's a lot of talking about how strange and wonderful Kurtz is, but I never experienced his profundity for myself or related to Marlow's intoxication with him. There are some great themes in the book, though (I love the warning about how thin and easily cast off the armor of civilization is), and some unforgettable scenes (particularly during the journey upriver and the arrival at Kurtz' camp).

8. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline



I'm not usually one to read a novel before seeing a movie adaptation. Generally, I prefer to see the film first and then enjoy the book afterwards. I tend to like both versions when I do it that way, instead of watching the movie and comparing it to the book.

But I was in the mood for some science fiction at some point last year and Ready Player One is so well spoken of by my friends that I chose it, even though Spielberg's adaptation is about to come out.

I very much liked the plot and the puzzle-solving and of course all the references to '80s pop culture. I didn't as much enjoy the trash-talking and posturing of the socially awkward main character and his friends. In fact, there was a point early on where I considered giving up. But I pushed through and was pleased that the arrogance lessened as the stakes increased, the characters' relationships deepened, and they all had to focus on other things.

If you want more detailed thoughts on the book, I highly recommend Nerd Lunch's discussion of it. I didn't participate in that, but they did an excellent job covering the novel's strengths and weaknesses.

7. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L Frank Baum



I've wanted to read this for years and finally pulled the trigger this holiday season. And I liked it quite a bit.

It's usually a drawback for me when a book's chapters are episodic like they are here, but it works in this. First of all, it's a children's story and easy to imagine Baum sitting in a nursery and telling these tales to a group of eager, young listeners. But also, the individual adventures work together to build towards the completed mythology of Santa as we know him today.

Baum's writing voice is pleasant and I enjoyed spending time in the world he created. It beats Rankin-Bass' version of Santa's origin story, Santa Claus in Coming to Town, in almost every way, though R-B did also adapt this novel and now I'm super curious to see that.

6. A Room with a View by EM Forster



The film version of this book is very solidly an '80s movie, but I always think of it as a '90s film, because it started two of my strongest '90s obsessions: period dramas (especially ones produced by Merchant Ivory) and Helena Bonham Carter.

I love the film version of A Room with a View so much that I have most of it memorized and when I finally read the book last Spring, I was surprised at just how faithful the movie is. It's so faithful that I experienced very powerfully the thing that most Read the Book Before Seeing the Movie people cite as their main reason for preferring that order: It was tough not to imagine the film actors in their roles as I read. Or read the dialogue with anything other than the inflections those actors used.

But there are differences between the two. Some things, the movie does better, like the ending. It's not drastically different, but it does make Lucy's climactic revelation more emotional and exciting. In the book's favor, though, I appreciate the additional insights it provides. For instance, I never picked up on why Lucy chose Schubert instead of Beethoven when playing for Cecil's family. Forster's still subtle about it, but he makes it clearer than the film does. And there's a whole subplot about George's mother that's left out of the film. All in all, it's a lovely book that made me want to revisit the movie as soon as I finished it.

5. The Monk by Matthew Lewis



After I spent Halloween 2016 talking about gothic literature, I've been slowly digging in and reading some. I'm a big fan of Castle of Otranto and have re-read it multiple times, but Mysteries of Udolpho was a slog and put me off the classics for a while. The Monk has renewed my interest. It's lurid and super spooky.

The trick I've learned with early gothic literature is to not grow impatient with the plot, but to immerse myself in the details of the moment. This is especially rewarded in The Monk (with the Bleeding Nun segment being an awesome sidebar to the main narrative, and arguably the best part of the whole novel). I'm also finding it working for me as I try The Mysteries of Udolpho again, though. I hated it on first reading, but am thoroughly enjoying it the second time around.

It was cool reading this alongside The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter by Ambrose Bierce, which I also read in 2017. Both stories go different directions from the same concept. They start with a virtuous monk, then put irresistible temptation in his way to see what happens. But while Lewis' character needs an outside influence to pull him towards sin, Bierce's falls all on his own.

Lewis has the more thrilling story, because it's so racy, but Bierce's (which does go to some ghastly places as well) is the more effective warning. Not just for religious people, but for anyone tempted to justify selfish, prideful activity in the name of trying to "help" someone.

4. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson



This got on my reading list when someone described it as Southern gothic and it does have creepy, gothic elements to it. What I enjoyed most though was the mystery of the Blackwood family and what exactly happened to make them such pariahs in their town.

It's not a difficult mystery to figure out, but getting to the solution is a hauntingly beautiful process as Shirley Jackson slowly reveals not just details about past events, but about the present mental states of the surviving family members. It's a lovely, unsettling book.

3. Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty



This is another one that I picked up because it sounded rather gothic. I was browsing at a book fair and liked the cover with the spooky house. The back cover blurb pulled me in further, talking about a young girl with a cryptic past who lives in the cellar of Biltmore House and is pulled into a mystery of disappearing children.

It's not really all that gothic, but it is a great mystery in a cool setting and with characters I got very fond of. There are supernatural elements, but the novel never crosses into true urban fantasy territory (a genre that's a tough sell for me). The supernatural bits are used sparingly and don't retread territory I've been over in other stories. Beatty is way more interested in the way that Serafina has been isolated her entire life and finally begins to connect with society. I liked that a lot and am looking forward to reading the sequel.

2. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame



My only association with this classic has been through Disney, first through Mr Toad's Wild Ride at Disney World as a kid, and later through their animated adaptation that's packaged with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. I finally went back to the source and I'm glad I did. I loved it.

It's a beautifully pastoral book. The opening chapters read like a series of short stories about the same, recurring characters. Since I was mostly familiar with Disney's focus on the irritatingly hyper Mr Toad, I was surprised and pleased to find so much of the book concerned with Mole and Rat. They're pleasant characters who live in a pleasant place and Grahame's wonderful descriptions make me want to live there, too.

I love his prose and especially the observations he makes about human (or animal, I guess) nature. I was completely hooked as soon as I read Mole's thoughts about vacations: "...he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working." Grahame gets me.

There are stories about hospitality and homesickness and curiosity and traveling and worship. They're all lovely. As they progress, Badger and Toad also enter the tales and the stories start to become more connected, so that there's a strong narrative pushing through by the end. That's the part that Disney latched onto, and it is entertaining, but it's not the best part to me. The earlier, quieter chapters are the ones that are going to stick with me for a long, long time.

1. Hope and Red by Jon Skovron



If you're looking for great book recommendations, I highly recommend following author Kelly Sedinger on Goodreads. His reviews have added several books to my reading list, including my favorite book I read in 2017. I hope to get to the others this year.

Jon Skovron is primarily known as a YA fantasy author, but with Hope and Red he breaks free from the restrictions of YA. That means that there’s sex and cursing, but unlike some other authors who’ve made the same transition, the adult elements in Hope and Red never feel gratuitous. The sex is hot, but emotionally real. And the language is the natural result of the story's being set in a seaside slum with its own particular slang. (I always get nervous when fantasy books include a glossary, because it’s always annoying to me to stop reading and go look up a word just to understand dialogue. But Skovron’s glossary is there for flavor, not homework. The slang in his world is largely based on ours and even when it’s unfamiliar, I’m still able to figure out meaning from context).

What Skovron absolutely brings over from YA is fast-paced adventure and compelling characters with strong, emotional cores. Hope and Red are the names of the leads and even though they don’t meet until deep into the book, their individual stories are equally fascinating. I never found myself wishing that Skovron would wrap one part up and move on to the other. By the time they met, I knew them both well and was eager to see how they would affect each other's lives.

What makes the whole thing especially palatable for me is that it’s set in a fantasy world of oceans and islands. This is the pirate fantasy that I wanted from On Stranger Tides. Hope begins her life living in a remote island village, but when something horrible happens to the rest of the community, she’s rescued and sent to live first with an even more remote group of warrior monks and then aboard a merchant ship. For his part, Red grows up in the aforementioned slums and spends some time as a pirate. You might expect them to meet from Red’s group attacking Hope’s, but Skovron has something else in mind. Which describes my whole experience with the novel. Skovron consistently twists and swerves around expectations and completely hooked me into wanting to know what’s going to happen next.

That's something that he does with the ending of the novel, too. He picks a great place to put a break in the Empire of Storms series, but it is a cliffhanger to be resolved in the next volume. I can't wait to read it. Not just because I have to find out what happens next, but because I really really want to spend more time with these people.

The One Hundred Year Test, or Let's Dust Off the Old Thoat [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Can you name one sports record from 1917? Football, baseball, hockey, anything? And to make it harder, a record that stands to this day? I rather doubt it. One hundred years is a long time when it comes to the ephemeral nature of pop culture.

And it’s the same for books. Looking at the top sellers of 1917, I see winners of the One Hundred Year Test (I'm a genre guy, so I'll stick to what I know): Oz books, John Buchan, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Anna Katherine Green, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen, Jack London, Edgar Wallace, James Branch Cabell. So what happened to the rest? Perly Poore Sheehan, Garrett P Serviss, Burt L Standish, H Hesketh Pritchard, Edgar White, Raymond S Spears, Sapper, Oscar Micheaux, and the list goes on... Any of these sound familiar? Of course not. Despite being popular magazine and book writers in 1917, they are all footnotes or known only to pulp specialists. The One Hundred Year Test (or OHYT as I will refer to it from now on) has eliminated them from the larger consciousness.

And it will happen again in 2117. Most of the writers now will be forgotten figures, too. It's a fact. Which ones will be remembered? I would not hazard a guess. I'm sure to be wrong. The top selling genre writer of 1917 was HG Wells with Mr. Britley Sees It Through (not a genre book, but a mainstream novel), followed by Zane Grey with Wildfire. Both authors have survived the OHYT, though Wells better than Grey. Most of the mainstream writers fared worse.

Genres in 1917 were largely still forming. The mystery is probably the most consolidated, recognizable back to 1841 with Edgar Allan Poe. Equally old is horror, but this would be either a Gothic tale (1765) or a ghost story (after 1820), approaching a more modern look by Dracula (1897). Adventure yarns began in earnest after Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1881) and HR Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885); the Western in 1902 with Owen Wister's The Virginian and the Northern with Jack London as early as 1897. And science fiction, still unnamed in 1917, usually called "off-trail fiction" or just "fantasy" would have to wait until 1926 and Hugo Gernsback to give it a name, though Jules Verne was popular from 1864 and HG Wells from 1895. In the actual genre “fantasy,” the books of Lord Dunsany were big.

All of these genres were evolving quickly in the magazines and early pulps. Edgar Rice Burroughs had just invented his brand of jungle lord adventure three years before in 1914 (though Kipling had his Mowgli twenty years earlier), as well as the interplanetary romance in 1912 with "Under the Moons of Mars." Hugo Gernsback was still nine or more years in the future as were the hard-boiled detective, the space opera, and the gangster crime drama.

The OHYT removes politics, commercial hype, and in some cases, unavailability. A reader in 1917 would not have found Tarzan or Oz books on the shelves of their public library. Librarians for decades campaigned against them in favor of "better" books. Readers today don't have to worry about beginning with Volume 3 in a series of 6. Nor do they have to wait for the installments that the original serial readers did. They have the complete run at their digital fingertips. They don't have to suffer banners reading "In the tradition of Robert E Howard" for a book that inspired that very writer twenty years earlier. (I speak of Harold Lamb, whose historical adventures inspired much of sword-and-sorcery. When Lamb was re-released in the 1970s in paperback he bore that very banner on the top of his books.)

The OHYT is a kind of guarantee. Not that the book will be easy to read - for there are changes in style in a hundred years, along with prejudices on race, gender, politics, and creed. No, it's a guarantee that the story is a good story, that people a hundred years ago were intrigued, excited, or felt something valuable by reading it. Because if these works were shallow, trendy, poorly executed, unimaginative, or dull, they would not pass the OHYT. The also-rans fall by the wayside and you are left with books that appealed to many people. (And it might not be “you” today - or “you” yet. I waited until my forties to enjoy Dickens, Twain, Haggard, Rohmer, and Stevenson. There is a future “me” who might one day be able to wade through Henry James or James Joyce.)

Let's look at a test case: Edgar Rice Burroughs versus Harold Bell Wright. ERB wrote sixty-nine novels from 1912 to 1950, creating iconic characters such as Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Harold Bell wrote melodramas with a religious theme like The Shepherd of the Hills in 1907, which sold a million copies. The two men share the following similarities: they both made huge fortunes from their writing, their books were both adapted into films, the critics hated or ignored them, both moved to California, both divorced and remarried, and both affected geography. Edgar Rice Burroughs developed and named the city of Tarzana, California. Wright has a subdivision in Tucson named after him, plus his novel also popularized Branson, Missouri, making it into a tourist destination.

Where the two men differ is that Edgar Rice Burroughs survived the OHYT and Wright did not. This is why we had a John Carter of Mars film. This is why Alexander Skarsgård is the next Tarzan. One hundred years is the copyright line in most cases (varying country to country). The public domain and online technology are making hard-to-find works available again. There is no guessing how many books will be rediscovered because of this line in the sands of time. But as they say in infomercials: Wait, there’s more!

With the advent of the public domain claiming legacy works, new "unauthorized" creations are springing up. This can be a big budget film like Tarzan (1999), John Carter of Mars (2012), or The Great and Powerful Oz (2013); all cases of Disney waiting until copyright has lapsed to avoid paying royalties. Or it can be less obvious fare. With the popularity of zombie rewrites like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, writers are coming up with some unusual ways to enjoy old classics again. The steampunk writers have taken a shine to Baum's post-Victorian fantasy and turned out some new tales from the stuff of Oz. And this is great, for let's be honest, both Burroughs and Baum are great storytellers (largely unappreciated by critics until recently), but their works are a century old and a little dated. A new spin on old novels gives modern readers a way to enjoy the innocent favorites of childhood or teen years. It also gives you a way to go back and enjoy new stories in familiar places, if you've read all twenty-six Tarzan novels, all forty-one Oz books, or the eleven Barsoom sagas.

Now you may be tempted to write your own Tarzan novel. I know I've thought about it a few times. (While Burroughs’ first novels are out of copyright, the name “Tarzan” is still protected – for now.) Look at all the Sherlocks that have been written since 1987. There could be a mad rush on new jungle adventures appearing on Amazon already. Tarzan of the Apes with Zombies. John Carter of Mars versus the Sparkling Vampires. I'm waiting. I won't read them, but it wouldn't surprise me. What I hope to see is something more like the works of Guy Adams who writes post-Wellsian novels like The Army of Doctor Moreau (2012) or JW Schnarr's Shadows of the Emerald City (2009).

There is a movement under way right now in which writers are playing in other people's backyards, for example the comics of Alan Moore or the Anno Dracula stories of Kim Newman. It's exciting, but it is also... a little dangerous. It's great if it drives new readers to old classics. This will cement the fame of these OHYT winners with new generations and continue their fame into the 21st Century. It's dangerous if it floods the Kindle shelves with very poor hackjobs and juvenile fan fiction. (Though I have to wonder what the difference is between "fan fiction" and an "unauthorized" reworking. Not much outside of court, perhaps.) The result could be a muddying of the waters that results in a lack of interest. But I don't worry about this too much. Four million bad Lovecraftian pastiches and an equal number of bad Howardian Conan copies haven't blunted their swords. The Cthulhu Mythos and sword-and-sorcery are as healthy as ever. (Cthulhu and Conan are in a kind of grey area copyright-wise and we'll see them join the OHYT crowd soon enough.)

Reader sophistication is really what we're talking about. You can read the original Tarzan of the Apes, appreciate how it broke new pulp ground, how it's more than a little racist by modern standards, scientifically impossible, and not quite science fiction, but appeals to SF fans anyway, etc, etc. How you enjoy it is up to you. You can also then read the last two authorized pastiches: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber (1967) or Joe R Lansdale's Tarzan: The Lost Adventure (1991), a book that is 25% Burroughs and 75% Lansdale. Or Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1977), an unauthorized one! And you can decide if they hold up against ERB's wonderful storytelling. And now you can plunk down $4.99 and buy that latest novel, Tarzan and the Pyramid of Blood by Wryter B Anonymous or I Wright Kindles or whoever, and see if Tarzan pastiche is worth the time. Personally I would grab it if it was written by Joel Jenkins, the only writer I know who has captured Burroughsian excitement without slavish imitation. His Dire Planet series is as much fun as Barsoom. Your sophistication allows you to enjoy the Burroughsian or Ozian novel from a standpoint of connoisseur, as co-conspirator in a literary game that promises some new fun in old places.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Adventures of Santa Claus [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Pere Noel. Whatever you call him, he is a busy guy. Every year he has to make billions of toys and deliver them all in one night. When would Santa have time to have any adventures? Well, he gets around more than you'd think.

In 1901, L Frank Baum who had recently seen his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sell well was looking around for another idea. Why not the story of Santa Claus? What child could resist a tale of Old St. Nick? What Baum produced was The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), a minor Fantasy classic in its own right, though it wasn't followed by multiple sequels like Dorothy's adventures in Oz.

Santa begins life as a foundling in the mythical forest of Burzee, home to Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. There, Ak the Master Woodsman rules and he allows the baby to be raised by the nymph Necile. He is given the name Claus, which means "little one", and "Ne" is added when he is adopted, "Ne-Claus" or Nicholas. In this way, Baum explains Christmas tradition after tradition, making up new and intriguing ways to explain everything from toys to mistletoe.

Now the plot could be pretty dull if Claus didn't have enemies to face. These are the Awgwas, creatures halfway between the fairy immortals and humans. They are giant in size and able to go from one place to another with magical speed. Their only agenda is to cause pain and suffering wherever they can. So, of course, they plan to steal Claus's toys that he makes to please the suffering masses of humanity.

This leads to a fantastic battle between Good and Evil (that Santa misses) with fire-breathing dragons, Goozle-Goblins, the Giants of Tartary, and many other fantastic monsters against Ak and his amazing ax. Baum doesn't give us Robert E Howard style blow-by-blow (the pity), but Good wins and Claus can go about his business of making toys.

The rest of the novel falls short of that great battle scene but Santa slowly figures out how to deliver the toys all in one night. When he reaches old age, Ak gives him immortality so he can go on lightening the hearts of humankind forever. The episodic tale does a good job of blending a new myth with an old holiday.

Baum had one last chance with Santa when the Jolly Old Elf made an appearance, accompanied by his friends, in The Road to Oz (1909). In this odd volume, Baum ties all of his series together in a multiverse worthy of Michael Moorcock. Children's books would now feature Santa on a more regular basis, since Baum had opened the door, but CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1951) is probably the most memorable. His Father Christmas gives out swords and bows, not just tea cakes. Lewis's battle scene between Good and Evil is much more detailed, though St. Nick doesn't take part.

But the kids weren't having all the fun. In January 1938, Weird Tales' popular author who usually wrote of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, presented what many consider his masterpiece, "Roads." Seabury Quinn builds his story slowly, beginning at the birth of Christ and ends in the 16th century. The story was illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and these drawings were used in the 1948 Arkham House edition.

Quinn tells the story of Claus in three parts. In the first section, "The Road to Bethlehem," we meet Claudius, a gladiator in the time of King Herod, a blond giant of a warrior. He wins his freedom in the ring and then wishes to return home. Before he can do this, he saves a baby from the purge that Herod's men are making. This is the baby Jesus, who makes Klaus immortal and sets him on a road to a great destiny.

In the second section, "The Road to Calvary," Claus, now a Roman Centurian, witnesses the death of the baby, now grown to a man. At the passing of Christ there is an earthquake, and Claus rescues the love interest of the tale, a girl named Unna. Quinn's action sequences take a page from Robert E Howard's prose style and spirit. Howard had been dead just eighteen months when Quinn wrote "Roads" and his red-dipped pen was sorely missed.

In the last part of the tale, "The Long, Long Road," we follow Claus and Unna, both immortal, as they move through history. Fleeing humanity's ills, Claus finds the elves and begins the last transition to becoming Santa Claus. As the baby Jesus tells him, his fate is not to die in battle but to become a person whom all children love and adore. Like Baum before him, Quinn peppers his tale with explanations on how certain Christmas traditions came about. Sam Moskowitz said that "Roads" was  “the greatest adult Christmas story written by an American.” Quinn had achieved for adults what Baum had done for children.

The idea of an heroic Santa, sword-swinging and powerful, a Hyborian Claus if you will, appeals to me on so many levels. And I'm not alone. Sony Studios is producing a new version of Baum's novel (now in the public domain) called Winter's Knight, featuring an ax-wielding Santa like you've never seen. This isn't the quiet Rankin-Bass adaptation from 1985, nor the less interesting Robbie Benson cartoon of 2000. It's not even the boisterous Santa of William Joyces's Rise of the Guardians (which borrows the spirit of Baum). It's a Roadsian version, a Howardian version, filled with violence and magic and blood. I can't wait.

Viking Santa art above is by Caio Monteiro. Art below is by Jakob Eirich.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Happy Oz Day!

Today was L. Frank Baum's birthday in 1856. My son is celebrating in the best possible way.

A nerdy complaint about Wizard of Oz continuity

Let me preface this by saying that even though I'm using panels from Eric Shanower and Skottie Young's adaptation to illustrate this, my gripe is in no way about them. Their adaptations are extraordinarily faithful to the source material, so the problem is all L. Frank Baum.

Here's the deal:



In the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wizard explains that when he arrived in Oz, he took advantage of the locals and made them build the Emerald City for him. That made an impression on me, because it's pretty huge evidence that - contrary to his own assertions - he's no more a "good man" than a "good wizard." This history of the Emerald City is repeated early in the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz.



But then later in Marvelous Land, the Scarecrow - current ruler of the Emerald City - offers a completely different history.



It's that version that Baum sticks with for the rest of the book. In fact, he hinges the entire plot on it since the whole story is about who actually has the right to rule the Emerald City. If you haven't read it, all I'll say is that there's a revolt that calls the legitimate rulership into question and Pastoria is an important part of the discussion.

Sure that I'm not the first to notice this, I went to Wikipedia and found that the problem's made more complicated in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, where it's revealed that it was the Wizard who ordered the city built, but that he didn't usurp it directly from Pastoria. The witches took it from Pastoria and the Wizard took it from them.

What all this means is that Baum was serious when he wrote in the preface to Wonderful Wizard that it was "written solely to please children" of his day. In other words, "You nerds need to lighten up and leave it alone." And I will try.

I do like how the Marvel adaptation of Marvelous Land fixes another possible continuity error that Wikipedia mentions though. In Wonderful Wizard, it's explained that the Emerald City isn't actually green-colored, but only appears to be because of the green-lensed goggles the tyrannical Wizard forced his subjects to wear from birth to death. I thought it pretty cool that halfway through Marvelous Land, the new leadership of the city drops the goggles and the city is colored normally for the rest of the book. Wikipedia points out that "the city is still described as green" in Baum's novels, but Marvel's colorist, Jean-Francois Beaulieu gives it plenty of natural greenery without the pervasive tint that everything has in Wonderful Wizard and the early parts of Marvelous Land.

With the goggles:



Without the goggles:



There's even a change in the city's attitude about its former leader, revealing that they're now more aware of the Wizard's deception. I won't post the spoilery panel, but there's a scene late in the book where a resident of the city declares that the Wizard "claimed to do things he couldn't." Though it happens off the page, apparently the citizens have realized that the Wizard was a sham and that's a nice bit of continuity development. I hope there's more stuff like that than like the shaky history of the place.

Top 10 Moments from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (that aren't in the movie)

After I finished listening to Anne Hathaway read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I wanted to continue the series, but in a different format. I don't want to commit the next year or two to reading all 14 books in their original form, but if Hathaway had kept reading the rest of the series, I'd gladly listen to it that way. Unfortunately, she hasn't.

Another option is Eric Shanower and Skottie Young's comics adaptation, but before I bought any of the sequels I wanted to revisit the first book while it was still fresh in my mind. That way I could see for myself how faithful it is and how accurately I can expect their other adaptations to translate the rest of L. Frank Baum's saga. Turns out: very faithfully.

I knew it was going to be okay when Shanower wrote in his introduction, "That this comics adaptation goes back to that book as its source is one of the aspects that drew me to this project. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been told again and again in so many different versions and permutations that many of the original's details have been obscured or forgotten. But they haven't been lost. Here they are again, those wonderful Baum touches..." And so they are. I feel like I'm in very good hands by continuing the series in this form.

To celebrate, I've picked my Top 10 favorite moments from Baum's book that didn't make it into the Judy Garland version. I mentioned some of them as I was reading the book, but here they are - in order of occurrence - as depicted by Shanower and Young.  Spoilers, of course.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Part 1 (Thank you, Anne Hathaway)

Been catching up today after being offline for most of last week. San Diego was awesome and I'll try to get a report up tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm finally reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Or rather, Anne Hathaway is reading it to me. I'm enjoying it a lot, especially the difference between L. Frank Baum's version and the classic movie. For instance, I really like the small contingent of Munchkins at the site of the East Witch's death and how before Dorothy completely leaves Munchkinland, she stops off for a party at a remote farm. It feels more like Frodo sneaking out of the Shire than the huge production number from the film.

Also, Hathaway is awesome at the voices and her Scarecrow is especially funny and pleasant. I'm not too far in, but I'm looking forward to the rest now that I'm back in town and can listen in my car again.