Yes, I'm still reading Oz stuff. No, I haven't had a chance to write them up much here. But now I'm on winter break, so I'm going to do my best to catch up before I have to go back to work. They're going to be all over the place, from both this most recent wave and the last one. There will be old and new books, magazines and comics, and maybe a few other surprises. It's going to get kind of random!
- 'aS 'IDnar pIn'a' Dun qon L. Frank Baum, mugh DeSDu'. When I finished the Klingon tree on Duolingo, I rewarded myself with this book. Yes, it is indeed a translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Klingon. Unfortuanetly my Klingon is still weak, and I can't read it well, but I do understand the sentence structure and at least some of the vocabulary. But this is going to truly be a long-term project to completely understand this one. I wish it had illustrations, and perhaps a glossary of new words created or discovered for this book, but I'm not at all unhappy having this.
- Father Goose: His Book by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. I have a very early edition of this book, but it's over one hundred and twenty years old now, so I'd rather not handle it more than I have to. This reprint edition is terrific if I just want to read or browse these poems. It's smaller than the original, but Denslow's art still reproduces well. In fact, publisher Marcus Mébès did some light restoration where the original publication was just misaligned enough to detract. He also didn't touch a word, even though many of the depictions of peoples that were considered amusing in 1899 fall very flat today. It is a nice way to get this book. It is only lacking a learned essay about the book's background and development and its influence on the careers of both Baum and Denslaw, but that may have to wait for another edition.
- Another rare piece of Baumiana also available from Mébès and Lulu is L. Frank Baum's Juvenile Speaker, which features excerpts and extracts from many of Baum's works suitable for recitation, which is a thing people did back in the day. Although this was originally published by Reilly and Britton, permission was granted by Bobbs-Merrill and the Century Company to include works that they then controled, so this book includes Reilly and Britton's first ever publication of any material from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The star of the book may be the finale, "Prince Marvel: A Playlet for Children" which was original to this volume, and is a highly simplified dramatization of The Enchanted Island of Yew. It's a fun collection of Baum's works, and includes an afterword by Michael W. De Jesus. It's one of the rarest Baum titles today, so I greatly appreciate having access to the material here.
- Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. This reread has been a long time in coming, as I hadn't read it since college, way back in the '80s. When I discovered the juvenile literature section of my college library, one of the first itemsI found was The Phoenixand the Capret by E. Nesbit, which I had started in third grade but didn't finish then. Then I hunted down the books by Eloise. I had probably only recently read Merry Go Round in Oz, but I at least had The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, so although I knew her Oz books, this was my first exposure to the rest of her works. Later, a beat up old library copy was one of the first items I ever purchased from Amazon, but I have never read that copy because this is a new reprint, thanks to legendary Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl including it in her Book Crush Rediscovery series. Upon rereading this, I remembered bits and pieces, but for the most part this was practically a new book for me. Shannon Lightley, the daughter of an international film star and a renowned director, has just graduated from high school in rural Oregon where, as just about everywhere else she's ever lived, she never really fit in. She doesn't know what to do next, but a family friend, a probate lawyer in Portland, needs someone to investigate a strange will, and Shannon reinvents hersolf as Georgetta Smith, rents a room at a boarding house, takes a waitressing job in the diner across the street, and spends the summer getting to know the locals. In the process, she also learns more about herself, falls in love (maybe), learns more about the eccentric deceased, and touches the lives of all around her as they do the same for her. It's a great little slice-of-life story, although it is definitely set in a smaller, 1960s version of Portland. Shannon is a fascinating character, and we see a lot of changes in her through the course of her summer. I'm glad I finally got to reread it.
- I still have a lot of Eloise's books to reread, but I also have a lot of books by Rachel Cosgrove Payes to read for the first time. My latest was the only book she wrote under a pen name that wasn't a science fiction novel by "E. L. Arch". This was part five of a romance series by "Joanne Kaye", set in the New York fashion world. (Kaye was a house name, and it's entirely possible that the other books in the series were all written by different authors.) According to some collectors of Rachel's work, this is one of the hardest of her titles to track down, so when I saw a copy for sale I snatched it up. Our heroine, Suzanna Blake, is looking to expand into sports fashion, and heads to Paris to mingle and possibly find a tennis player to work with at the French Open. She becomes enmeshed with the affairs of Ginny Norris, a young prodigy who is under the thumb of her stepfather/manager. Ginny is secretly engaged, and when one of New York's most notorious tabloid gossips gets wind of this, Ginny finds she needs Suzanna as an ally. It's all pretty standard potboiler/romance stuff, and of the many romances I've read written by Rachel, this has the steamiest, most graphic descriptions of carnal acts. Between Oz, science fiction, and this, I can certainly attest to Rachel being a versatile writer! It's harmless fun, but a lot of the attitudes in this book have changed in forty years, and since Ginny is only sixteen, some of it definitely made me cringe. The characters' attitudes towards lesbians wouldn't fly these days, either.
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