The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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1. paulmdMay 2022
   (other readers: sorry, I know this post is going to be a bit obnoxiously long, but I didn't want to put it on a pastebin or some other external service and potentially have it disappear if someone wanted to reference it in the future. If you're not interested please feel free to collapse this!)

   I actually asked my mom to compile a list of books she could remember, because a friend had kids and was getting to the age where they were starting to read too. Here's what she came up with (note, no particular order of difficulty or maturity here):

   My Father’s dragon series

   Where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein

   A pizza the size of the Sun

   Choose your own adventure books

   The Great Brain

   The Boxcar Children series

   Captain Underpants

   Roald Dahl books: The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/The Great Glass Elevator (not as good)

   My Side of the Mountain

   No More Dead Dogs

   The Secret Garden

   Bridge to Terabithia (Deals with death, a little older)

   The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe

   Across five Aprils (civil war historical fiction, older)

   The Broken Blade (Voyageur) & Sequel

   Island of the blue dolphins

   The witch of blackbird pond

   Johnny Tremaine (a bit older)

   The sign of the Beaver

   Charlotte’s Web

   Because of Winn Dixie

   Tuck Everlasting (sad at end)

   Ruby Holler

   The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

   Treasure Island

   The Pushcart War

   Maniac Magee

   Rascal

   Frindle

   Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)

   Mr. Popper’s Penguins (young)

   Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (Juy Blume)

   Pippi Longstocking

   Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (young)

   A Wrinkle in Time

   Moccasin Trail

   Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

   From the Mixed Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

   The Egypt Game

   The Phantom Tollbooth (young)

   Holes (little older)

   Sideways Stories from Wayside School (young)

   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

   Homer Price (easy reading)

   The Indian in the Cupboard

   Misty of Chincoteague (series)

   Aesop’s Fables (young)

   The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm

   Redwall series

   Watership Down

   (I'll throw in the Discworld series too for kids that are getting a bit older! It's probably very readable for, say, an advanced 5th grader. I was tearing through all the redwall books and the Golden Compass series at that point and Discworld is probably comparable. Golden Compass wasn't finished then and The Amber Spyglass ended up being kind of a disappointment. I know I was reading Discworld by 7th grade for sure.)

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2. zhoujianfuSep 2019
   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
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3. mbanerjeepalmerNov 2025
   We started reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum on November 11, 2025.
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4. pcaharrierJan 2025
   >L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is probably the most enduringly influential work of American subcreation

   Does Douthat answer his own question here? Or is there a sense in which Oz doesn't fulfill his requirements for "great" American fantasy?

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5. cbm-vic-20Jul 2022
   "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" called this out over 120 years ago.
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6. mellavoraMar 2022
   The Wizard of Oz was actually in fact a silver/gold allegory.

   https://economics.rutgers.edu/joomlatools-files/docman-files...

   L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, however, is not only a child's tale but also a sophisticated commentary on the political and economic debates of the Populist Era.1 Previous interpretations have focused on the political and social aspects of the allegory. The most important of these is Littlefield ([1966] 1968), although his interpretation was adumbrated by Nye (1951), Gardner and Nye (1957), Sackett (I960), and Bewley ([1964] 1970). My purpose is to unlock the references in the Wizard of Oz to the monetary debates of the 1890s. When the story is viewed in this light, the real reason the Cowardly Lion fell asleep in the field of poppies, the identity of the Wizard of Oz, the significance of the strange number of hallways and rooms in the Emerald Palace, and the reason the Wicked Witch of the West was so happy to get one of Dorothy's shoes become clear. Thus interpreted, the Wizard of Oz becomes a powerful pedagogic device. Few students of money and banking or economic history will forget the battle between the advocates of free silver and the defenders of the gold standard when it is explained through the Wizard of Oz.

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