Classics Considered

Currently: at home, listening to the rain, trying to fend off the beginnings of a cold.  (I haven't been sick in quite some time...it was bound to happen.) What better time to talk about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ? Most people are familiar with the film, having the somewhat abbreviated title of The Wizard of Oz .  It was one of my childhood favorites, perhaps more so even than Mary Poppins , and I still love it.  You'd have to be hardhearted not to at least sympathize with Dorothy's plight and desire to find home, after a gigantic cyclone tears her family apart and literally drops her in a strange, fantastical land.  For my part, I've never stopped wanting a pair of ruby slippers (magical or otherwise). L. Frank Baum's 1900 book predates the film by some decades and the modern reader by over a century.  It takes us a little more imagination to picture even Kansas.  Baum's sparse yet concise prose helps us in this: When Dorothy stood in the doorway and lo...