Let me just start off by saying I am 55 years old. I have never read The Wizard of Oz books in my whole life. As a child, I struggled with reading because I have dyslexia and I have a learning disability and later in life I discovered that I have attention deficit disorder. So I have many factors working against me when it comes to reading books. So this was never on the reading list for me as a child or teenager or any age. It was this year in 2025 that I made a New Year’s resolution to start reading The Wizard of Oz books, and today I’ve finally finished reading them.

There are 14 books in this collection, and many years ago when I first got my Kindle I had bought all 14 books in one single Kindle ebook. Since I’m doing the reading challenge with Goodreads, I decided that instead of reading the one with all of the books included, that I would buy every book on my Kindle because if I just read the one book, then it would count as one book instead of 14, so I bought all 14 books. Thank goodness it wasn’t that costly because most of them were a dollar, but some of them were free because they are in the public domain.

I was a bit surprised to read so many different characters that I’d never heard about in the original movie based on the first book. But of course they only did a movie based on one book. In the 1980s they had a movie called Return to Oz and that story included the second and third books combined. They altered the story a bit, but that’s pretty much what Hollywood does anyway. But in return to Oz they introduced some characters that nobody has ever heard of, so when I saw that movie many years ago, I didn’t realize that those were actual characters from the books. I thought it was just Hollywood being creative. It wasn’t until I actually started reading the books that I realized those are actual characters that L. Frank Baum wrote about. Silly me.

We just recently had a movie come out called Wicked based on the wicked witch and Glinda the good witch, which is based on a play. Look, I don’t know much about this because I’ve never seen the play and I still have yet to see Wicked, but when it’s on digital I will watch it. But I wanted to read the books before I saw Wicked because I want to get to know the world of Oz before I watch any more about it. It is interesting that the movie and play Wicked is based on Glinda meeting the wicked witch for the first time and what, they’re going to college? I’m a little confused, but I will be up to date I’m sure when I see the movie lol.

All I’m going to say is that if you have not read these books yet, read them because these books have added more to the magical wonderful world of Oz to my brain than I could have ever imagined. It’s an interesting story and it’s an interesting world and all of the characters are very, I hate to be redundant, but I’m just going to say interesting again.

Now that I have finally fulfilled my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to go back to reading all the other stuff that I like to read with vampires and other supernatural things LOL.