{"id":2510,"date":"2004-12-19T15:37:58","date_gmt":"2004-12-19T20:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/19\/2510.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:29","slug":"book-report-the-marvelous-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/19\/book-report-the-marvelous-land\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Marvelous Land of Oz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Evidently, it&#8217;s been well over a year since Your Humble Blogger read an Oz book. I assume that&#8217;s a shelving issue; I like them often enough to take one into the bathtub with some frequency, but my hand doesn&#8217;t fall on them.\n<p>Anyway, I just finished my umpty-&#8217;leventh time through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harperchildrens.com\/teacher\/catalog\/book_xml.asp?isbn=0688054390\">The Marvelous Land of Oz<\/a>, and I enjoyed it mightily. There were the usual startling jokes (somebody tells the moaning Jack Pumpkinhead not to worry about being made into a pie, but to look at it as better than spoiling, telling him it&#8217;s better to be a tart than a degraded intellectual), and a good deal too much Woggle-Bug for my taste, but the plot works better than most of them, and of course there&#8217;s lots of Scarecrow and Tin Man.\n<p>By the way, there&#8217;s a story I&#8217;m looking for that would be more or less contemporary with Mr. Baum, and is possibly by Mr. Baum himself. I read it in a book that is an anthology of &#8220;modern fairy tales&#8221; or modern fables or some such. The book had a L. Frank Baum story, I&#8217;m sure, but I can&#8217;t remember whether the really brilliant story I half-remember (about a princess and an elevator operator) is his. The other stories included, I think, an excerpt from Ted Hughes&#8217;s <I>Iron Giant<\/I>, and Charles Dickins&#8217;s&#8217;s &#8220;Magic Fishbone&#8221;. It was probably published in the seventies or eighties (at a guess from my vague recollection from the jacket, if I&#8217;m thinking of the right book). Wait ... my mad Google Skillz have just figured out that if I know two stories in a book, I can come up with it. And ... it&#8217;s the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oup.com\/us\/catalog\/general\/subject\/LiteratureEnglish\/MythologyFolklore\/?view=usa&amp;ci=0192803832\">Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales<\/a>. And the Baum story in that collection is &#8220;The Queen of Quok&#8221;, which is a good story, but not the one I was thinking of with the princess and the elevator operator. Well, I&#8217;ll get the book from the library and see if it&#8217;s in there. And it&#8217;ll be the wrong book entirely, most likely.\n<p>Thank you,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Evidently, it\u2019s been well over a year since Your Humble Blogger read an Oz book. I assume that\u2019s a shelving issue; I like them often enough to take one into the bathtub with some frequency, but my hand doesn\u2019t fall&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17243,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions\/17243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}