The early ones are good as children's books, but I love to reread the DeSmet books (On the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years) as YA classics that really hold up to adult re-reading.

Oh, I agree, Kathy. The DeSmet books were the ones I read over and over again.

Does anyone read Lisa, Bright and Dark anymore?

Thirding the love of the DeSmet books, especially Little Town and These Happy Golden Years. The Long Winter is a little...harrowing...now that I'm old enough to appreciate just how close to the edge they were.

So do people read the abridged or the unabridged Little Women?

I loved the abridged, but the unabridged made me want to smack some of the self-righteousness out of a couple of people.

This photo of the three girls (Carrie, Mary, and Laura) is an interesting look at them post-Long Winter. Carrie is obviously still sickly, Mary definitely looks like she would not want to eat "the only bug in the Dakota Territory," and Laura, with that steely look in her eyes and that clenched fist, is ready to take on anything, with a left hook if necessary to help her family.

Huh. I don't think I KNEW there was an unabridged version of LW. Which makes me want to immediately run out and read it.

I think my copy of Little Women is unabridged.

I tend to find the self-righteousness in LMA anthropologically interesting--i.e. I still want to smack the characters on occasion, but I'm also thinking, "Huh, so that's what people in that place, time, and social circle got uptight about."

Hey, it sucks to be a teenage girl no matter what time period it is.

Especially if you're dying of consumption.

Little Women is relatively light on the sanctimony and self-righteousness when compared to some of her other screeds/novels. Jack and Jill is a tract on alternative home education that reeks sanctimony. Eight Cousins is only saved by those male cousins and their entertaining ways, as well as Rose's little feminine vanities that make her human (I love the scene where she gets tempted into having her ears pierced and she tries to hide it for fear of being teased over her girly ways).

Especially if you're dying of consumption.

God, consumpation confused me back in the day. I couldn't figure it out, and the name was SO not helpful. But in almost every novel I read in a certain period of my teenage years, someone was dying poetically and wanly of consumption.

"La grippe" also confused me for a while. I think I was thirty before I figured out it was a fancy, stuck-up way of saying "cold or flu, I dunno, I'm Victorian."