Just Finished Reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Last year when I visited my sister in Austin, Texas, she had on one of her bookshelves the entire collection of L. Frank Baum's Oz series of children's books.  Intrigued by them, I resolved to read through them some day: after all, the 1939 The Wizard of Oz, for most of my childhood, reigned supreme by far as my favorite, must-see movie.  LibriVox is a free site that provides audiobooks for works that have fallen into the public domain, as is the case for Baum's series.  I was able to listen to the first book from 1902, appropriately titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, through LibriVox via YouTube...pretty cool!  The book story differed in a number of ways from the movie, most strikingly in that while the film version with Judy Garland as Dorothy and Margaret Hamilton as the very scary Wicked Witch of the West can be pretty frightening for little children, Baum in his preface to this book wrote that he deliberately set out with this series to provide a set of modern fairy tales that weren't as scary as older, more traditional ones.  Also, in the movie it's all a dream in the end: not the case in the book.  There are numerous other differences between the two versions as well (e.g. Dorothy's ruby slippers from the movie are silver in the book)...all in all I enjoyed the book, and the person recording it did a good job...much better than I would have done.  Now I'm moving on to book #2, titled The Marvelous Land of Oz...