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.

I think it's as books, but it's hard to tell. I originally read them in my teens.

I read them as a kid. But I've found only a few childhood books I loved don't stand the test of time.

Honestly, my understanding of that epoch in history was informed by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It isn't perfect or to take totally factual. But mom started reading LHotP when I was 4 or 5 and it was a revelation to me. It made me create..imaginations. I still wonder about maple syrup candy ( half my family were immigrant farmers, and likely the eras and geography overlapped) and I still giggle when mom puts an orange in the stocking at xmas.

The last installment, The First Four Years ? was my first taste of tough romance in a sense, I think. I think I read that one on my own later. Things get fucked up, go wrong and you survive and you love. At least, that was my reading at the time.

God, I'm protective of that series. I've been to Walnut (whatever it was called) and the dugout and and and. Been there. Parts of my family lived in it.

Oh goodness: the buffalo coat, peppermint and oranges, hairstyles in Little House the Big Woods, (wings over Caroline's ears!) maple syrup; candy, pork...whatever the that boiling was. Blacking the stove, the teacher tests and expectations of women, blizzards, housing, the diseases, the biases regarding Indians, the blackface, the dog, the sleeping arrangements ( I only wonder now how Ma & Pa had the kids that they did!)

To the extent there was fictionaliztion at all, it still told a lot.