Recent Reads: Little House books

[mizkit]

I bought the Little House series (the proper edition, illustrated by Garth Williams) for Young Indiana last year for Christmas, thinking that sometime in the next year or so he might be about ready to start having them read to him. A few months ago he got LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, brought it to me, and said, “Maybe we could read this book! It

Comments

[tersa]

*crows*

The Little House books are some of my favorites...and if you want to talk food porn, FARMER BOY is it. :D (many years later, I saved a copy of the birdsnest pudding recipe I stumbled on in college because the description of it in that book stuck with me forever.)

It's been fascinating falling down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and reading some of the more non-fictional recounts of Laura, Rose, and how those books came to be.

it’s possible there’s another family-wide illness in one of the later books)

You're probably thinking of the scarlet fever that hits them between PLUM CREEK and SILVER LAKE. And, yes, I still know just about every book (helped by the fact that I've re-read them at least once as an adult).

It was fascinating to discover that the jump in time between those two books also glossed over the birth and death of the Ingalls' only son and a move to Iowa before returning to Minnesota.

[tavella]

Yeah, the stuff with her daughter Rose is very interesting, and amusing in a way. She was an early libertarian, so when editing and reshaping her mother's autobiographical writings, she carefully edited out most of the substantial government support they got as settlers, or so I recall. Down the memory hole!

[mizkit]

Yeah, FARMER BOY is just hungry waiting to happen. :)

I got Mom a copy of PIONEER GIRL, the annotated LIW autobiography, for Christmas last year. I don't know if she's read it all, but I've read bits and it's *fascinating*. And also mind-bending.

I'm sure I'm thinking of the scarlet fever, yeah. I knew it was an incident, anyway, since it's blamed (incorrectly, as it turns out) for Mary's blindness. It'll be interesting to get to it and re-read that. :)

Apparently for a lot of the time frame an uncle and aunt were living with them too, so they were actually trying to support a family of 8 on the generally limited Ingalls income, too. And also apparently at least twice they lit out of town in the middle of the night one step ahead of the creditors, which strangely enough isn't mentioned in the books... :)

[tersa]

I didn't even know PIONEER GIRL existed until I looked her up on Wikipedia recently. Now I want it like burning. :P

lol. What Tavella mentioned in the comment above is probably part of that white-washing... :)

Still, for all of the parts that suffered creative revisionism, they're great books. :)

[tavella]

I should reread them some day. I've been a bit reluctant to do so in case the Suck Fairy had visited, especially given my understanding of exactly what the Ingalls were doing (illegally homesteading on NA land, with a distinct chance that Pa was involved in killing natives), but things like braiding hay into firesticks will always stay with me.

[mizkit]

They were certainly homesteading illegally. If Pa was out killing natives I think I'd rather not know. :)

[suricattus]

Yeah - re-reading those books with an actual knowledge of American history puts an entire new layer on events....

That said, they are still fascinating, and well-done, and formed the first basis for me writing SILVER, so there's that. :-)

And FARMER BOY was a fun read, once Young Indy is ready for it. A very different perspective, considering it's done in the same voice and style. And not simply because it's a "boy's story."

[tavella]

I don't think there was any specific evidence, just a historian noting that a number of Osage in the area who tried to push back against the illegal squatters including the Ingalls got killed by whites. He might have been involved or he might not, same as anyone else among the settlers, but either way it's pretty likely he knew the perpetrators.

[deborahblakehps]

I loved those books. My home ec class (yes, that was when they had such things) cooked some of the dishes out of the books, which was a great tie in to the reading.