Hurriposting

Top 5 Recipes: A Wish List (as in, recipes I want to make):

1. Miso Soup
2. Julia Child's Soupe a l'Oignion
3. Baguette (for real this time)
4. Lemon curd. (It's just such a pleasurable experience.)
5. Any kind of gumbo so I can practice making a roux

But as for things I can't stop thinking about eating:

1. Brutti ma Buoni, these amazing Italian cookies my Aunt Grace makes whose name translates to "ugly but good." Italians, you kill it on a regular basis. 
2. Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic as described by Smitten Kitchen

I'm not even hungry, I just keep thinking about roasted chicken, garlic, and those cookies.

So. Not last post but the post before, I told you that there's a book I loved as a child but would not let my own children go near. This statement is not entirely accurate. When I was but a lass, I read these books obsessively (yeah, I know, that doesn't narrow it down. I have an obsessive personality; sue me.) but did not realize, no matter how many times my family told me, that these books were seriously creepy, to the point where I'd be uncomfortable with my child reading them. This is a universe where no one ever dies...even if they've been chopped into tiny pieces with a cleaver or eaten by a dragon. I'm talking about....

I took great pride in having read all fourteen in the series, plus Sea Fairies and The Life and Times of Santa Claus to boot. I didn't have any classmates who had read that many....or any of them, actually. My parents had read them all....I think, at some point, but years and years ago, so I couldn't talk to anybody about these crazy-ass books that I loved so much. 

I'm conflicted about the Oz books because I was not in a great emotional place when I became obsessed with them. When I was nine, I didn't have any friends and my teacher was the first adult I had ever met who did not like me. Do you remember meeting your first adult who didn't like you, or at least didn't like you as much as you were used to being liked? I was used to people loving me, or at least putting up with my weirdness, but Mrs. Lonergan (name burned into my brain via shame and humiliation) did not tolerate a child as silly as I was, and I did not know how to respond to this treatment. So for a full year, I retreated into books (and as I later realized, dance), because I literally did not have anywhere else to go. I was in an emotional state where I didn't see how messed up the Oz books were. I just saw that they were pretty and shiny and the mean guys were punished. 

Apart from the super-creepy "you never die, no matter how hard you try or how much you're suffering" thing that Baum states at least once in every book, the world is pretty awesome! There's a village made of people who are puzzles, there are miniature pigs who do tricks, everyone's pretty much nice all the time, and there's basically no poverty. My favorite of the series has always been The Road to Oz, because it has the most interesting and unusual characters. For example: 

Johnny Doo it, capable of solving any problem ever.

The Shaggy Man, who's basically a hobo, only he possesses the Love Magnet, so everyone loves him and does whatever he wants. He's friends with Johnny Doo it for this reason. He's just irresistible. 

And of course, Polychrome, daughter of the rainbow, who eats things like dew-drops and mist-cakes and whines a lot. But she's hot, so she can get away with it. 

It's a magical world....but still super weird. What do you think? Are the Oz books too creepy to let your kids read? I doubt I could handle reading them to my children.