Bookshelf:

Wicked

Yeah, I know, I haven't been writing much lately. My life has been pretty dull recently. Well, okay, work has been busy and even a little exciting, but essentially not worth writing about here. We had a new guy start on my team this week, went out to lunch with him on Wednesday, and I went to lunch with some friends from another team on Thursday. And otherwise I've been fixing bugs, finding bugs, helping people fix their bugs, etc. etc.

At night I've mostly been working on two projects. First, I've been preparing for my fantasy baseball draft tomorrow, and second I read Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire. It's the book for this month's Keplers SF book discussion, which is also tomorrow.

My capsule review of this book is, "A good idea poorly executed." Its essential premise is to examine the background of Elphaba, the Wicked With of the West from The Wizard of Oz, and explore why she was wicked. Unfortunately, the book undermines its premise by not being about the Wicked Witch, but merely about a Wicked Witch in some world different from L. Frank Baum's. Born with green skin, Elphaba is merely misunderstood. The tyrannical Wizard arrives shortly after her birth and takes over Oz from the regent for the baby Ozma. Elphaba goes to college in Shiz where she meets Galinda (yeah, her), a prissy society dame, and Elphaba develops a feeling for the sentient Animals who are being marginalized by the Wizard's edicts. Following a tragedy in the school, Elphaba strikes out to help stop the Wizard, but she eventually ends up in self-exile in the western lands until that well-meaning child from Kansas drops a house on her sister and is sent by the Wizard to kill Elphaba.

Although the book seems to think it's exploring the nature of evil, it doesn't really examine the truly evil characters in the story (such as the Wizard), and indeed many interesting characters leave the stage without ever being explored in any depth. All the while Elphaba is driven closer to the brink of desperation, which would make for a fine story if she were even a tenth the force that she's depicted in the original story. Instead she's just a sad figure unable to take control of anything she deems important, with a tragic date with destiny.

In short, Elphaba is neither Wicked nor truly a Witch. (In fact, she develops some spell-casting abilities at the very end, but they have the feel of Maguire thinking, "Oh! I'd better make sure she's actually a witch by the time Dorothy shows up!")

The whole story feels tremendously manipulative, without ever giving us true insight into who's doing the manipulating, to what ends, or who the people being manipulated (other than Elphaba) truly are. Several tantalizing mysteries are set up and left unresolved. And the well-known conclusion to Elphaba's story makes the whole book feel abbreviated.

Inasmuch as this could have been an interesting story, I was disappointed. This particular story didn't need to be told, in my opinion. And it certainly doesn't bear any useful resemblance to the actual Oz stories. Pity.

Oh, the fantasy baseball draft preparation is going pretty well, but as always, the proof will be in the pudding. I'll probably have a brief report tomorrow or Monday for you baseball geeks out there.

The only other thing to note is that I took advantage of a sale at Bookbuyers today, picking up some Margery Allingham mysteries (flush with my reading Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey books, I plan to tackle Allingham's Albert Campion series at some point, if I can find them all; they're not kept in print as well as Sayers' books are), as well as a stack of old Dragon magazines with episodes of the strip "Wormy" in them. I need to eventually figure out how best to store all those Wormy strips without keeping all of the 100+ page magazines around. I don't really want to cut up (and therefore ruin) the magazines themselves, and I suspect that copy shops would balk at making color photocopies of all the strips just on the basis of copyright matters. So I'm not sure what my plan is.

Oh, and I also picked up the CD The Very Best of Asia: Heat of the Moment, with the essential tracks from the 80s supergroup. Yes, it's fluff, but I enjoyed it when I was in high school. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, though.