Cool and/or sad Little House book tidbits I've discovered on the Internet:

(Sad) Cap Garland died only a few years after Laura and Almanzo were married, when a thresher boiler blew up and killed him and several other farm workers.

(Also sad) Almanzo felt like a failure for most of his life after being crippled by diptheria (described in The First Four Years) and having to struggle with farming for the rest of his life as a result of the debilitation and lack of sons to help with the farm.

Rose was the only and last blood-descendant of Ma and Pa. Mary never married or had children, and both Carrie and Grace married widowers, but had no children of their own. Rose delivered a stillborn child during her failed marriage to Gilette Lane, but never remarried or had further children after divorcing him around 1917.

(Happier) Lana, the wild-child cousin of Laura's we see in On the Shores of Silver Lake, lost contact with Laura's family soon after they move on from Dakota Territory as seen in that book, but happened to be reading OtSoSL soon after it was published in 1939 and recognized herself. She was able to contact Laura through her publisher and they stayed in contact until she died in 1943.

I've never read the "Little House" books because they were always presented as "girl's books", and thus I assumed they were insipid. Are they less treacly than the TV series would have me think?

They're very... curious books, Connie. They're books about ordinary daily life (among a family of four girls), mostly in frontier territory.

On the one hand, they introduce child-readers to a different way of living: the rhythms of farm-life, the idea of your family being all of your social contact some years, the ordinariness of poverty. On the other hand, they were definitely written in a different era, meaning there's a chapter in one of the later books where Pa and several colleagues dress up in blackface, and everybody finds it hilarious. And you're not necessarily sure whether the narrative voice agrees or not when Ma says, more than once, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

So. Not especially gooey girly stuff; I read it along with Swiss Family Robinson rather than Sweet Valley High.

I'm booktalking Girl, Interrupted tonight but it's been years since I read it. I know it's autobiographical, story of depressed girl who gets put in mental hospital (late 60s), details about other patients. Anything really good that I'm missing?

I'm booktalking Girl, Interrupted tonight but it's been years since I read it. I know it's autobiographical, story of depressed girl who gets put in mental hospital (late 60s), details about other patients. Anything really good that I'm missing?

She's there because she tried to overdose on a bottle of tylenol, I think. It's been ages since I read that book but it's really good.

And you're not necessarily sure whether the narrative voice agrees or not when Ma says, more than once, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

I think it's pretty clear that wasn't Laura's and Pa's opinion. Ma was always the voice of convention.

Connie, I think they're wonderful books, and not at all treacly. The treacle factor is one reason I loathed the TV series. The books are very much about the nitty gritty of life on the frontier. The really interesting thing about it is that the maturity of Laura as narrator matches her age at the time, so the point of view becomes more mature through the series. That's one reason why I don't agree with the "Rose wrote the books" theory. She probably cleaned them up, but I just can't see a professional writer approaching the stories that way.

I'll pick up the first one and see how it goes. I tend not to re-read books I enjoyed as a kid because my cynical grown-up self tends to overthink things that made me happy then.

I reread them every couple of years and I'm still happy with them.

I can't wait to read them to Sara. I adored them and reread them for years.

Do you enjoy them as books or as revisits to pleasant memories? I've got nothing about revisiting pleasant memories, heaven knows that's why Little Women still lives on my bookcase. I'm curious how I'll feel about what's touted as a touted as a children's classic at age 47.

Of course, I could just shut up and read the book. It'll be good for me, I haven't read something that wasn't on a computer screen in months.