[jekylljuice]

Time to rescue this all-important thread from being banished to the murky depths of the Other Entertainment back pages.

I finished reading Wicked last week. Yeah, I know I'd been reading it for a while and had always become totally engrossed by it whenever I picked it up, but I then did have to put it down periodically whenever academic reading called. By the time I got to the final portion of the book, however, I was able to read the final hundred pages in a single day. It was fantastic reading, in which Maguire really succeeds in making you empathise with and root for the cackly green horror you were brought up to fear - if not by Baum then by Victor Fleming, as in my case. Elphaba remains a flawed and at times morally questionable character, but this book really enables you to step inside her (non-ruby red) shoes and feel for her, and I found the last few pages to be extremely poignant. I'm definitely going to see the musical some time (which, I am aware, makes some fundamental deviations from Maguire's narrative, but apparently they do work), and I'm also going to make a point of checking out some more of Maguire's fiction in the future, since apparently he has a whole series of books dedicated to re-interpretation of celebrated stories from the antagonists' point of view.

I've also been reading A Rat's Tale by Tor Seidler, a lovely little book from my childhood which I'd been reminded of ever since Ratatouille and had long been meaning to revisit. Although a bit less epic than I seem to have envisioned it as at the time - well, back then a book of around 200 pages certainly seemed like an epic to my inexperienced literary mind - it was every bit as funny and delightful as I recall it being, and naturally I'm inclined to appreciate any book that gives a sympathetic depiction of my favourite rodents. I've picked up another book about Tor Seidler, which I've never actually read before, called the Wainscott Weasel, so I guess that'll be the next thing I'll be engrossing myself in.