The Latest Ozzish Reading

Two things I read recently aren't Oz, but have Oz references, so I thought I'd report on them:

• First, the Back to the Future comic book, issue nine (and if you are any kind of BTTF fan, you really need to get this book) sees Doc developing a version of his time machine that involves jumping from a balloon! (No, it's not terribly safe.) Jennifer, Marty's girlfriend, asks in the very first panel, "I assume you tried clicking your heels and saying, 'There's no place like home'?" Doc, suffering from amnesia, asks, "Why would we—?" before Marty interrupts with, "It's a movie, Doc, I'll explain later." Doc adds, "I'm familiar with The Wizard of Oz—I read the books as a child. I was merely pointing out we're not traveling home." The beautiful part about this is that Doc has read the books—plural. We know Doc is well read based on his love of Jules Verne in Back to the Future III, this just cements it and broadens his reading.
• The Poe Estate by Polly Schulman is her third book about the New-York Circulating Material Repository and one of its special collections based around objects from fiction. The first book, The Grimm Legacy, dealt with fairy tale items (including a certain pair of silver slippers) and the follow up, The Wells bequest, dealt with science fiction (rockets, ray guns, time machines, and the like), so naturally this book deals with ghost stories and gothic horror. Sukie has to deal with moving into her cousin's house after the death of her older sister and her family's economic problems. Helping out her parents at a swap meet in New York City, she gets creeped out by the strange man who wants to buy her cousin's broom from her. So when Andre and Dr. Elizabeth Rew from the Repository find a few interesting items and buy them from her, she enlists their help to find out what's going on. It turns out that not only her cousin's house, but even Sukie herself may have their roots in an unfinished story from the nineteenth century. Like the other two books, this is a fun read, even if we don't see as much of the Repository this time around. And yes, The Wizard of Oz does get a name check.