The Emerald City of Oz
By
Frank L. Baum

Frank L. Baum's The Emerald City of Oz (1910) turned 100 years-old in 2010.  It's Baum's seventh book about the wonderful land of Oz; sources say Baum intended to write one book, The Wizard of Oz, (1903), but his bored ten-year-old fans persuaded him to keep writing and he created the Oz compendium, the fourth book entitled Ozma of Oz (1907).  After he completed The Emerald City of Oz, his fans wouldn't let him off the hook. He wrote Oz books until his death, a total of 13, maybe.

Those same fans provided him much of the material for his books. Baum writes in his introduction to The Emerald City of Oz that he intended to be a writer of "fairy tales" and became instead, a "private secretary for a host of youngsters whose ideas I'm supposed to weave into the thread of the story." So, when describing the schoolhouse in Oz, the kids have suggested the story elements: for example, difficult subjects are contained in oral pills that children swallow, and the school is called a gymnasium where the children spend their school hours playing games. Baum indulged their every whim.

The Emerald City of Oz behaves like a book wrapping up loose ends.  Dorothy transports her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to Oz to live out their lives in splendid wealth and fun.  It's a strange book because it's such a dark time for Em and Henry. They suffer financial difficulties and the bank forecloses on the farm. Em and Henry fear for Dorothy, but Dorothy reassures them that she can disappear to Oz whenever she wants because Princess Ozma, the ruler of Oz, checks up on Dorothy every day through a mirror that follows Dorothy's every move. All Dorothy has to do is give the signal at the right moment -- and Ozma does indeed transport her to Oz.

This is all good and fine for Dorothy to escape the foreclosure proceedings back in Kansas, but Dorothy frets about her aunt and uncle facing a nasty banker. Rather than find enough riches in Oz to return and pay off the farm debt -- as a reader might expect -- Dorothy convinces Ozma to bring her aunt and uncle to live out their lives in Oz. Ozma, like Dorothy, is a ten-year old girl. All the decision makers on Oz are ten-year old girls. Ozma makes Dorothy's wish come true, and she goes on some adventures with the people she loves the most. By the end of the book, all connection with Kansas is severed and Oz fades away behind a cloud-filled Kansas sky.

When I read this old book, I pictured a family around the kitchen table sharing this stuff. Before The Advent of Television, it must have been fun. Unlike say, Harry Potter, the Oz books are so undeniably written for ten-year old kids. Critics over the decades have found much to fault about the Wizard books and Baum was no saint, just an artist showing his young readers the way things were in the World, albeit from a fantastic place. The very ordinaryness of Dorothy and her relatives is remarkable. I get a terrific sensibility of Dorothy and her Kansas home when she rather boorishly replaces the word "explain" with "splain", as in, "I need to 'splain that, or I need to 'splain this."  Now I understand what people meant when they said, "did you just get off the train from Kansas?"

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

A novel  Check it out at Amazon.com

By
Steig Larsson

This pulp detective novel was so engaging I read it in a weekend and did nothing else.  The pocketbook ran 600 pages, so it took a weekend.  Critics called it sleazy, so at first, I wanted to ignore the book. Unfortunately, the Swedish films of the Tattoo Girl/Millenium triology popped up on Netflix and they rocked. Michael Nyquist and Noomi Rapace gave great performances. After watching the American version, I don't believe Daniel Craig seemed as good a Blomkvist as Michael Nyqvist. Noomi Rapace owns Lisbeth, IMHO. Whatever, I could no longer ignore the first book.

The book knocked both film versions out of the park. The author, Steig Larsson preaches that writers should be engaging, and he practices what he preaches.  By engaging, he must mean a writer who presents his characters in a favorable light, enough that you want to read on even after they become monsters, bores, drunks or whatever.

Larsson makes some errors, the most egregious is that he tells his story, he doesn't show it, but he proved so engaging, I didn't take much offense at his style.

Lisbeth Salander, the woman in the title, the story's detective, doesn't really come on the case until the last third of the book, and by that time it's becoming so hard to solve the mystery that her effortless skills become almost magical. The journalist Kalle Blomkvist, who takes a job investigating a murder in a big business family, is Lisbeth's Dr.Watson, a competent enough fellow, but slow and nagged by self-doubt.

Lisbeth is a Sherlock Holmes character in the cyberworld, a computer cracker but much more complex than your garden variety geek.  She's like Holmes because she's eccentric, moody, drugged and haunted by institutional horrors from the past. She's disinterested in material pursuits and is unabashedly pursuing monsters for ulterior reasons, largely revenge.  Lisbeth is so much like Holmes, it's downright fun:). So the book is highly entertaining, but the critics are right; it's a sleazy book.

Larsen's little community of Hedesmith and the island the Vanger families live on is positively intriguing.  This book works because of the setting and atmosphere, the powerful Vanger family, a compelling mystery and Lisbeth solving the grisly mystery just in the nick of time. It will be hard to avoid reading the remaining books in the trilogy..