Even now I cringe to think of Mary and her husband, and the blind school, and the fire, and the weird boy Ma and Pa adopted...shudder. The books were so wonderful as written, why change them? I suppose the show wouldn't have been on the air for ten bazillion so many years if they hadn't taken so much blatant artistic license.

And the books are in about seventeen different forms now, I noticed. Picture books, shorter chapter books, blah blah. Again, why? Grrr.

It seems so unnecessary to dumb down Little House on the Prairie. It's already an easy to read book meant for young readers, fer cryin' out loud.

Edited cause I really can spell prairie when I'm not concentrating on the italic tags...

What the television show did that was so unforgivable to me was to make it all sweetness and light. The Little House books are, to me, some of the best memoirs we have of the frontier, even if Rose Wilder Lane did clean them up. It's Laura's excitement at the Christmas she got a tin cup and a piece of candy and at the first time she had an orange that show so vividly how little they had. The television show made everyone nicer, cleaner and more prosperous, and it was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Although, it made Nellier MUCH bitchier.

Which, I loved.

Also, my favorite re-write for the show? Story around Nellie. "Jews come to the Prairie". Cracked my shit up.

The thing about the Most Challenged list that got to me was that 9 out of the 10 books were challenged because adults thought they were inappropriate for kids (Magic! Language! Sex! Potty Humor!). The 10th was a book about handguns, and was challenged for being inaccurate.

Sometimes Americans really make me want to weep.

What Ginger said. Not to mention Laura working as a seamstress at 14, and a teacher at 15, boarding with a couple where the woman was going dangerously crazy, and keeping a stiff upper lip at home because she didn't want her parents to make her quit and lose the money and any chance of teaching again! Or the family burning hay and going hungry to survive the long winter. And how the fun and happy parts were so different from my 1970's childhood. A lot of my love of history I owe to those books.

And what Susan said. The series ended up mainly being set in DeSmet, after all the moves, but even with that, they could have including braiding hay for the fire until their hands bled during the long winter, the sewing and the tacitly lying about her age to get to teach at 15 to raise the money to send Mary to school. And then to continue the series with all these happy-ever-afters. Mary never married and lived at home. Laura and Almanzo failed at homesteading and had to go back east.

I think I only read one or two Little House books, and I don't really remember them.

There were plenty of times as a kid that I read stuff that my parents didn't think was appropriate for me. The only book that my mother ever actually took away from me was Jephti's Daughter by Naomi Ragen, which I started reading when I was about 9. (It had some sex scenes that she thought were inappropriate for a 9-year-old, but by the time she noticed I was reading it, I was already a few chapters in and refused to just stop reading. The next time I put down the book and left the room, it mysteriously "got lost.")

The first time I ever heard of homosexuality was from some older kids at a Jewish summer camp, who used the word and then refused to tell me what it meant, so when I went home I asked my mother what it meant. I think I was about 8 then. There's really no way to totally control what kids hear when.

My mother used to regularly search my room to find out what I was reading. When I was a senior in high school, a friend loaned me a Tolkien(I believe it was The Silmarillion) and she told me that if I didn't return it immediately, she was going to burn it, since it had dead trees on the front and couldn't I see that it was about death? Why did I want to read about death? I never did finish reading that book.

When I was a junior, my father took the assigned book, Lord of the Flies, and wrote all through it, scripture passages, with references. He told me I had to take it back to school, show it to the teacher, and explain every passage. I was terrified. He wrote in a book! The school's property! My teacher was thrilled with the feedback and he and she had many interesting conversations about the book. It was the only book that my parents challenged that I could read at home, that I was allowed to finish, because of the teacher's attitude. She was pretty amazing.

Wow. Deena, I think we had exact opposites for adults in our respective houses. We had a "nothing with words in it is censored" policy. If it was on the shelf, I could read it, which may explain some of my weirdnesses; I do remember blinking at a Japanese pillow book (no clue who it belonged to), asking my aunt if this was the same thing the animals on my uncle's farm always seemed to be on about, and why the facial expressions? SHe told me yes, that was about right, and about those facial expressions, to ask again in about five years if I still needed a reply (I was about nine).

The only time I ever got flack from an adult about what I was reading was with Ayn Rand. I had picked up something, I think "Atlas Shrugged", and my grandmother asked me why I was reading that filthy nazi rubbish, and for heavens sake, throw it in the trash where it belonged. I didn't do that, but I did put it away; went back and read it later, or tried to, and discovered that Ms Rand and I do not cohere.

But that was the only time I remember, and it wasn't censorship, just a reaction to a book by someone she'd met and cordially loathed. And the adults in my family were just as likely to point out things they didn't like or agree with in everything else, including the various sacred texts from Jewish to Chrisitian to Hindu. But I was allowed to read everything.