I would love to find the books in first editions. I do have a few second editions of the Macguffey readers just because of their appearances in the LIW books (I picked up the Fourth and Fifth Readers at an antiques store near Dayton, OH, which is the area where they were published). If I could ever afford it, I'd love to find an original Garth Williams illustration from one of the books, but they are so sought after that I think I'll never be able to get one.

ETA: Thanks for the McClure rec! I just added it to my Amazon wish list for later purchase. Looks like fun!

My mom thought Mormons and Amish were the same for a while. I have an internet friend who I've known for years, her family is Mormon, and my mother honestly spent months wondering why she had a computer.

That's awesome. I think I was confused about Mormons for a long time after reading The Great Brain series...

My next school project is a paper on a specific religion (it's up to us which one we want to pick, as long as it's not our own). I decided to do mine on Shakerism, although I did briefly think about maybe doing it on the Mormons.

I've never read the Little House books. The TV series always struck me as so cloying and awful that I avoided the whole thing. That may have been my reaction to Michael Landon, though I've never reacted well to stories about cheerful, helpful, spunky children. I liked the sullen, rebellious, loner kids. OK, I was always rooting for the blonde girl who picked on Laura.

How are the books different from the TV show?

OK, I was always rooting for the blonde girl who picked on Laura.

Nellie! Hah. Nellie was outstanding.

I liked the show a lot as well, but I think the books are a lot less cloying and a lot more matter-of-fact about what was going on.

Yeah, I never saw the show, but from the books I certainly think of Laura as more rebellious than cheerful. Maybe not sullen, but stubborn and independent.

The books are so completely different from the tv show that I do not know where to begin. The books contain a lot of traveling and moving around, and the number of secondary characters is far smaller. And even though they were a bit didactic, it is nothing like the "message in every show" sensibility of the tv series.

Also, eat before you read Farmer Boy or you will end up devouring the world. That book has more food porn than Like Water for Chocolate!

Completely different, Connie. They are really immersed in the experiences of frontier life with detailed descriptions of everything from the clothes to the food to the travails of every day. As for the characters, they are just fantastically drawn, from Laura and her sisters to her parents and all of the secondary characters.

Cloying is not a word I'd use for the books (although ITA I would use it for the TV series). Riveting, wonderful, funny at times, and gripping at others (The Long Winter is an amazing account of the killer winter of 1880-1881, and the chapter when Almanzo and Cap risk their lives to get enough wheat to feed the town and save it from starvation is edge-of-your-seat nailbitingly written).

I remember in the TV show, towards the end, they had like 4938261 children in the house and none of them were really theirs. Grace, maybe? Was there really a Grace?