i've already kind of wanted to do something like this for a while anyways, since i've got a lot of my favorite books stashed away in there where they havent seen the light of day in forever

the box was actually still sealed with tape, which means i haven't opened it since i moved out of seattle in 2017. which i hadn't realized

but yes, i managed to find and extract all 4 volumes of the wicked years, alongside a couple other books i'm fond of and hated having stuffed away in a box

books 2, 3, and 4 are original hardcovers, book 1 is a paperback with a special cover based on the musical's poster design (and it also has an insert with photos of the musical's first production)

i don't think i even knew about the musical when i first found book 1, i just happened by pure chance to see the tie-in edition first and the cover caught my attention just from how it looked

i've always had......... mixed feelings, about the musical, as someone who read the book first. the music is the hypest shit imaginable and the performances were legendary, but some of the decisions wrt how they adapted the plot were... strange

in an ideal world i would simply think of them as two separate stories, but in practice it's not that simple is it

really i'm happy that this story i loved got such an incredible tribute on broadway in the first place, flaws notwithstanding

and now by all accounts the movie has done for the musical what the musical did for the book

i'm really happy it exists and i really want to see it, but part of me also can't help but think about how this is an adaptation of an adaptation and wonder about how much might have gotten lost in this cross-medium game of telephone

i sound negative when i put it that way but i'm really not trying to be

i mean. ok. there are SOME parts of the musical that i straight up dislike lmao. but the musical is still Good and i dont want to accidentally convey otherwise by rolling around in my complicated feelings about it

that said, i REALLY need to re-read the book

god it's been so fucking long

The Wicked Book is Crazier (and Smarter) Than You Th...timely

the video talks a little bit about the opening scene of the book, and... man. what a rough note to open on, in hindsight

i either didn't know or had forgotten that wicked was originally published in 1995

which makes it a shockingly progressive work for its time, if perhaps curdled a bit by the passing of nearly 30 years

i guess this also means it would have been about 10 years old when i first found it, as a teenager

it's kind of funny in hindsight that i read wicked as a closeted teenager, with absolutely no experiential or emotional apparatus to be able to process its queer themes

which were plain as day to me when i re-read it as an adult but which flew over my head completely as a teen

I saw the musical first, then read the book without knowing that the musical had deviated quite so intensely. I was... not mature enough for the book at that moment. and very much disliked the book for several years.

I was not out, nor had I really had much interaction with this type of queer/progressive literature.

I do wonder what I would think of it now... I've not read the first book again. and clearly did not read any of the rest of them.

i'm also kind of wondering how well it holds up. though judging by the excerpts in the above video (barring the one from the opening scene), it seems like the answer is probably "pretty well"

book 2 was quite an experience for teenage me too, come to think of it. it almost seemed like the book saw me missing all the queer subtext from book 1, then basically went "ok, fine. here. textually bisexual protagonist who textually sleeps with another man. do you Get It now"