Most people know Oz from the movie. The ruby slippers, the yellow brick road, the Wicked Witch, the great and terrible Wizard behind the curtain. It's a wonderful film. But it is a pale shadow of what L. Frank Baum actually wrote.
We read all fourteen Oz books aloud. All of them. It took us the better part of two years, reading in the evenings, picking up and putting down, coming back after breaks for other books. And I can tell you: the world Baum built is stranger and richer and more surprising than almost anything else in children's literature.
The first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is the one you think you know. But even here, the book diverges from the film in ways that matter. Dorothy's slippers are silver, not ruby. The Wizard is more pathetic than threatening. The ending is quieter and more earned.
But it's the later books where Oz really opens up. The Marvelous Land of Oz introduces Tip, a boy who turns out to be something else entirely — a plot twist that is genuinely surprising and handled with more grace than you might expect from a book written in 1904. Ozma of Oz gives us Princess Langwidere, who collects heads and swaps them out depending on her mood, which is exactly as strange and wonderful as it sounds.
There are books in the series that are weaker. Baum was writing quickly, for money, and it shows sometimes. But even the lesser entries have moments of real invention, and the best ones — the first four or five — are as good as anything in the canon.
What I love most about reading them aloud is watching children encounter a world that doesn't follow the rules they expect. Oz is not a place where good always wins cleanly or where the logic is consistent. It's a place where anything might happen, where a tin man can have a heart and a scarecrow can have wisdom, where the most powerful person in the land turns out to be a small girl from Kansas.
Read the first one. If your kids love it, keep going. You might end up reading all fourteen.