I’ve listened to one and a half audiobooks now and thought I’d pass along my thoughts on them. Several years ago we also listened to the Focus on the Family Radio Theater productions of Chronicles of Narnia and Les Miserables, but I think those were dramatizations rather than readings.

In general I would still prefer actual books. I just prefer reading that way and I like being able to mark specific passages, to linger over some spots or reread them, or trip a little more lightly through others. Plus I can read with other people around and still be available to them: with an audiobook, I either have ear buds in or am in another room, so I tend to listen to them when alone. That’s not really a problem unless it’s a really exciting part of the book and I’d love to listen to a few pages but can’t!

However, audiobooks have helped immensely with driving time. It’s about a 20-minute drive to my mother-in-law’s place and to a few other destinations, and I’m hardly aware of the time going by, whereas beforehand I was chafing at the time in the car not accomplishing anything except moving from one destination to another. I’ve also started listening to them while getting ready in the mornings and want to incorporate them while exercising or house-cleaning.

I don’t think I could listen to a non-fiction book that way that wasn’t in story form. Those kinds of books take a little more concentration, anyway, and I tend to mark passages, place sticky tabs all over to try to help me retain information from them. I could listen to them and glean something, I’m sure, but I just wouldn’t get the full benefit of them just by listening. That might be a good way to review a book I’ve already read, though, or preview one I plan to read.

I am more of a visual learner. A few times just when my attention has lagged or I’ve forgotten something in the audiobook that I can’t then go back and look up (without listening to significant portions again), I’ve wondered how difficult it must have been for people to retain Scripture when they primarily heard it, when they didn’t have written portions for everyone, when the Colossians got a letter from Paul that was read at their assembly. I don’t know how easy it would have been to make copies. They were probably more trained to really listen then than we are now, but I am still glad to have lived in an era of the written word.

But I find I am enjoying audiobooks immensely at times when I can’t get into a paper book.

I started a trial subscription on Audible.com that is $7-something a month for the first three months, and you’re able to get one credit (which usually gets you one book) each month. After that trial period it goes up to the regular $14-something a month, which seems pretty high to me. If I am going to pay that much I’d rather get the actual book. I’m not sure why they’re that expensive: I know the author needs to be paid royalties and the reader and producers need to be paid, but it seems if you’re making one file that multiples of people can download, that would be less expensive than making multiple copies of the actual book. So I may drop the Audible account after that, I’m not sure.

I have discovered some good resources in learnoutloud.com and http://gobible.com/. They’re regular prices seem expensive but they do have good sales or occasional free downloads.

How about you: do you know of any good resources for audiobooks? Do you enjoy them? What is your experience?

Stephen W. Hines read the Little House books several times as a child and then introduced them to his wife after they were married. Upon finding that Laura had been a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist before she wrote her books, Hines published those columns together in a book, Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder (I’m a little over halfway through with that one). He heard from many readers who loved and wanted to know more about Laura. He discovered no one had ever conducted interviews with the people who knew her at her last home in Mansfield, Missouri, so he decided to do so, publishing those and several articles by and about Laura in I Remember Laura. This book, then, is not so much a biography as it is a companion book to Laura’s other work or to biographies of her. At its publication (in 1994), Hines felt that there had not been a definitive biography of Laura written which included new papers and letters that had since come to light.

These articles and interviews are grouped into sections, the two biggest being reminiscences of her life in De Smet, South Dakota, where many of the Little House books took place, and then reminiscences of Mansfield, Missouri, where she spent most of her adult life. There are other sections on “Women in the 1920s” and “Laura and Rose,” her daughter. There is a bit of overlap with Hines’ book of her columns: he reprints a few of them here.

Laura was in her mid-60s when she began writing the Little House books. It seems they began as a way to preserve family memories. There is a bit of controversy over whether publication was her idea or her daughter Rose’s, and several people take credit for urging her to make a book out of them. But however they came to be, her town of 800 had thought she and her husband were retired, and then “took many years to become reconciled to Mrs. Wilder’s latter-day fame as a story-teller.” Many people the author talked to began by saying, “If I had only known that she would become famous, I would have paid more attention to what she said and did” (p. 61). It’s a little ironic that some of the people Hines interviewed said they hadn’t read her books until she either gave them a copy (they were expensive back then at $2.75 🙂 ) or until they got to know her a bit. It’s amusing, then, that in a piece on the Wilders for Mansfield’s centennial album, one writer says, “We know Laura was special. But there has to be something special about the town that provided the environment necessary for her talent to shine through” (p. 274).

Most remember the Wilders as fairly quiet people who kept to themselves, Almanzo especially, but many had memories of visiting with Laura or seeing her in town. She was generally regarded as friendly and industrious. At the dedication of the local library, it was noted she was “famous in her own community for her fine needlework, delicious gingerbread, and in general known as a good neighbor” (p. 269).

When asked why she didn’t write more books, one time she replied that the money she received from them cost her more in taxes. “She never found taxes on those who had labored their way to prosperity to be an incentive for even more labor” (p. 97). But another time she said that if she wrote more, she’d have to get into some of the sad times of her life (p. 122).

Her first years with Almanzo were pretty sad, marked by the loss of a baby, years of drought and crop failure, then his diptheria and a stroke which left him unable to work a full day. They arrived in Mansfield in that condition, with enough money to put a payment down on a rocky piece of land where they literally built an existence with their bare hands, cutting and selling wood until they could grow crops and build a house. That is truly amazing to me: I don’t know if most people these days would have either the knowledge or the spirit to do such a thing. “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm” and “My Apple Orchard” tell in their own words how they started and then improved upon the grounds and land through the years.

A few other highlights I noted:

When a friend commented that life begins at forty, Laura replied, “No, dearie. It begins at eighty” (p. 134).

She told another friend how, after her sister Mary became blind, Laura “would make word pictures for Mary so she could ‘see'” (p. 136). Perhaps that was early training for the stories she would write later on.

It was especially interesting to me that, with all the opportunities opened to women as a result of their needing to work in a variety of places during WWI, she wasn’t against those opportunities, but she urged, “We must advance logically, in order, and all together if the ground gained is to be held. If what has hitherto been woman’s work, in the world, is simply left undone by them, there is no one else to take it up. If in their haste to do other, perhaps more showy things, their old and special work is neglected and only half done, there will be something seriously wrong with the world, for the commonplace, home work of women is they very foundation upon which everything else rests” (p. 170). She was at least one voice who didn’t dismiss that “home work” as drudgery or demeaning but rather as a meaningful contribution to home and society.

I hadn’t realized before that there was a bit of controversy over how much Laura’s daughter, Rose, contributed to the writing of the Little House books. Rose was a known writer and editor, and speculation runs from the thought that Rose only advised her mother and used her own connections to get the books published, to the other extreme that Laura’s writing only the bare bones of the books, and Rose arranged and ghost-wrote much of them. The truth is likely in-between.

There are a few photos of Laura throughout the book, and to me she seems one of those rare people who become prettier as they get older.

There are even a few recipes in the book. Hines and his family tried many of them. Most came out fine, but the results of a few left them wondering if what constituted a successful cake or dish then might be different from our preferences mow.

The book was a little dry in places: many of the interviews Hines conducted and published cover some of the same information, and perhaps that  could have been summarized and harmonized rather than recorded individually. But his affection for Laura shines through.

Overall this was an interesting book that gave a fuller picture of Laura in her adult years and helped separate fact from fiction.

On another note, I didn’t realize until last night that Februray 7 was Laura’s 145th birthday. I had originally chosen February as the month for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge specifically because her birth and death both occurred in February, but it didn’t even occur to me to have a “birthday party” or some kind of special remembrance of her on that day. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next year.

Welcome to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge!

Many of us grew up reading the Little House on the Prairie series, unwittingly getting our first taste of American history and laughing and sorrowing along with the Ingalls family. Every time I read them, at different ages and stages of life, I get a little something more or something different out of them and I enjoy them all over again. That is a characteristic of a true classic.

After participating in a couple of Carrie‘s reading challenges and discovering how fun it is to read an author at the same time with others, I decided to host a reading challenge based on Laura.

You can read the Little House books (any one or all of them if you’re up to that!), a biography of her, or any book somehow related to her. If you’d like to prepare a meal from the Ingalls’ recipes or do some other related project, we’d love to see it! You can read or do as little or as much as you’d like.

In the comments below you can leave a link to your blog post about what you plan to do for the challenge (or just tell us in the comments if you’d rather), and at the end of the challenge on Feb. 29, four weeks from today, I’ll post a wrap-up post so everyone can tell us how they did. I would encourage you to write a wrap-up post listing what you read and perhaps what you learned or enjoyed (or didn’t) about your reading time. If you want to write reviews of the individual books as you read them and then list your reviews in your wrap-up, that would be great, too.

I’ve had several books relating to Laura on my shelf unread for years, I am embarrassed to say, and I’d like to read them for this challenge. They are:

I Remember Laura by Stephen Hines. It’s not exactly a biography: the author states it is more a mosaic or cornucopia of letters, poems, columns, etc. from Laura and from various other people that shed more light on her life.

Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines. This is a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles Laura wrote before she wrote the Little House books, arranged by subject. I have looked at bits and pieces of this but I’ve never read it all the way through.

Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines.

I don’t know how I came to have three books written or edited by Stephen Hines!

I’d also like to reread at least the first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods. If I have time I may read the next one as well.

I usually go through nonfiction much more slowly than fiction, so to have three nonfiction titles in a month is pushing it. But I’ve also hand on hand for a while The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure about seeking “the Laura experience” by going to some of the places and doing some of the activities mentioned in the books. I’m wary of it — I got kind of burned by recent experiences with modern secular books and bad language, and I’ve been told this is “irreverent,” and I am not quite sure how that will play out. But if I have time I might give it a try.

So…those are my plans. Will you join me? What are you planning to read?

Thanks to the Grab My Button Code Generator for the button and grab box below!

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The end of January brings with it the end of Carrie‘s Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge.

My plan in my initial post was to pick up where I left off last year in rereading the Anne books. I only committed to reading the next two, but I secretly was hoping I’d finish the last four so I could start off next year reading some of LMM’s other books. And just finished the last book, Rilla of Ingleside, yesterday afternoon.

Here is what I read with links to my reviews:

Anne’s House of Dreams, about Anne and Gilbert’s first year of marriage. Loved this — it’s vying with the first book, Anne of Green Gables, for my favorite of the series. Love the mixture of blissful first days together with sorrow, the familiar characters and new memorable ones in Captain Jim and Leslie Moore.

Anne of Ingleside, Anne as a mother of five children, with a sixth coming during the book. It’s neat to see Anne’s exuberance “tamed” a bit — maybe “matured” would be a better word. Most of the focus is on the children, and many of their misunderstandings are good reminders that things are processed differently by them.

Rainbow Valley focuses more on the children than Anne, but even more on a new set of children belonging to the new widowed minister. Not one of my favorites of the series, but still a good read.

Rilla of Ingleside focuses mainly on Anne’s youngest daughter and her maturing from kind of a vain frothy teen to a sweet, mature woman during the course of the hardships of WWI. Love this book.

Seeing less of Anne as the books go on reminds me of someone’s lament once over seeing pictures of only their friend’s children in Christmas cards, “But we want to see you, too!” But Carrie pointed out that LMM only kept writing about Anne at her publisher’s insistence, so she was probably getting tired of her by then, plus she was writing these books primarily to younger people, I believe, so it’s natural the focus would be on the youth.

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting these books again. Some of LMM’s rapturous descriptions and and the eccentricity of some characters is a bit over the top and seems more so each time I read them (whether that’s due to my advancing age or increased familiarity with the books, I don’t know), but there is still enough else that I really like about her that I can forgive that. There is a wholesomeness about them and a sweetness that in my opinion is just right without going overboard. I like the emphasis on the nobleness of doing good and right.

Thanks to Carrie for hosting! And stay tuned here tomorrow for the beginning of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge!

Rilla of Ingleside is the eighth and last in my set of Anne of Green Gables books by L. M. Montgomery. Rilla, Anne’s youngest child, is 15. All her brothers and sisters are in various levels of higher education, but Rilla has no educational ambitions: “There’s bound to be one dunce in every family. I’m quite willing to be a dunce if I can be a pretty, popular, delightful one” (p. 16).

A passing note in the newspaper about the murder of some “Archduke man” “in foreign parts” makes little impression on the Ingleside folks, unaware as they are that this is the beginning of the Great War, or as it later came to be called, World War I. But all too soon the call comes for service and Anne’s two oldest boys enlist – cheery Jem, ready to take on the world, and quiet, poetic Walter, lover of beauty, loathing ugliness and evil, yet compelled to do his duty.

Other friends and playmates from the Glen answer the call as well, ushering in four long years of waiting, checking the news every day, keeping track of everyone’s condition, war efforts at home from rationing to fund-raising. Spirits rise and fall with the daily news of battles won and lost and loved ones wounded, missing, or dead.

Rilla has to grow up fast, and though her mother laments that she has become a woman too soon, she rejoices in the help she is to her.

I’ve read many books set in WWII, but WWI wasn’t as familiar to me. This book was originally published in 1921 and the war ended in 1918, so it was still relatively fresh in the minds of its early readers. The facts were interesting, and the long weight of it on family members back home was realistic. There was a general spirit of everyone pulling together in both world wars that seems to have been absent in wars ever since. I’m still pondering that.

Of the eight books, this one ranks behind the first Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams in my list of favorites. There is both laughter and sorrow, idiosyncrasies and poignancy.

A couple of favorite quotes: the first night of hearing that England had declared war on Germany, “Rilla told herself pathetically that she felt years older than when she had left home that evening. Perhaps she did — perhaps she was. Who knows? It does not do to laugh at the pangs of youth” (p. 34).

And from Susan, Ingleside cook and housekeeper, on the “right” to pride in a certain matter: “Pride is cold company” (p. 208).

One of the things I enjoy about LMM’s books is the little ironic asides she inserts from time to time. I love that she doesn’t draw undue attention to them, leaving them for the reader to discover and chuckle over. In one in this book, Susan is talking about an old quarrel with a cousin: “We quarreled when we were children over who should get a Sunday School card with the words ‘God is love,’ wreathed in rosebuds, on it, and have never spoken to each other since” (p. 9). Though such a quarrel in real life would not be a laughing matter, the absurdity of a feud lasting for years over a sentiment about God’s love makes the reader smile and shake her head over such foolishness.

I loved this book, loved seeing Rilla grow and mature, though parts of the process were painful. And though it is kind of sad to be at the end of the Anne books, it is satisfying as well. I’ll look forward to reading some of LMM’s other books for next year’s LMM challenge.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

The title of Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery is taken from an area where the Blythe children play which they named. In this seventh of LMM’s Anne series, the action picks up just after the place where it left off in Anne of Ingleside. Anne’s four older children are joined in the valley by four new children from the manse. The Presbyterian church has got a new minister, but they hadn’t known beforehand that he was a widower. He in an excellent preacher, but is a bit absent-minded, easily lost in his thoughts or a good book to the point of forgetting to keep tabs on his children. That causes a series of scrapes and misunderstandings, mostly comical though some are scandalous to the town and especially the congregation.

It’s an interesting story in itself, but, for being in the Anne series, there is very little of Anne in it and even less of Gilbert. Anne seems to be the voice of reason and balance, seeing the humor in the various situations that come up and defending the children. Anne’s children are best friends with the manse children and interact with them often through the book, but still the focus seems to be on the latter. I’m curious as to why Montgomery focused on the manse family in this book — whether the Blythe children were not likely to get into some of the situations the manse children were, or whether perhaps as a pastor’s wife she wanted to shed a bit of light on how a pastor’s family, particularly the children, can feel with the watching eyes of the church and community on them and how the most innocent of actions can be blown into a major scandal by gossip and a lack of charitableness. If any of you have read of the background behind this one, I’d love to hear it.

I thought Rosemary West’s story was very sad and sweet, and I loved the glimpses into Mr. Meredith’s (the pastor’s) thinking and struggles when he was “awake,” as one of the children’s friend’s called it when he was focused. There’s foreshadowing of the coming war. I’ve read this series before, but I can’t remember which of Anne’s sons goes off to war in the next book (don’t tell me — I want to find out in the book). I wonder whether there will be any romances between the Blythe children and the manse children as they grow up (if so, perhaps that’s another reason for the focus on the manse children here.)

I’d have to say this isn’t my favorite of the Anne series, but it is still very good.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

The folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read.

Wow — I totally forgot about this until I saw it pop up on others’ blogs!

But here is what I finished since last time:

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room by Nancy Guthrie, read with Jesse. I had read it privately last year.

Belonging by Robin Lee Hatcher, reviewed here.

Serenity by Harry Kraus, M. D., reviewed here.

Anne’s House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery, reviewed here.

Anne of Ingleside, reviewed here.

I’m currently reading:

Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz, with my youngest son, Jesse.

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery.

I’m currently listening to:

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I’m loving the story, but I’m dismayed by a smattering of bad language in it, particularly taking the Lord’s name in vain. 😦  I didn’t think about that when I got it, but I should have.

Up next:

I’d really like to read Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery to finish out the Anne series for Carrie‘s L. M. Montgomery Challenge so next year I can start on others of her writings. We’ll see how it goes!

I’m hosting the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge in February, so naturally much of my reading will be in connection with her next month. I’ll have more to say about that on Feb. 1, the first day of the challenge. (I invite you to join us!)

I’m definitely addicted to audiobooks now. Once I finish The Help, I think next I’ll listen to Silas Marner. I’ve actually had a CD for that for years, but never got to it. I’ve often wondered about it since one character mentioned it on the Little House on the Prairie TV show a few years ago — and I think I may have seen a version of it on Wishbone when my kids used to watch that (hey, you’ve gotta take your culture where you can find it sometimes. 🙂 )

What’s on your nightstand?

Anne of Ingleside takes up several years after Anne’s House of Dreams. Anne is a busy mother of five children now with another soon on the way. The book starts with a visit back to Avonlea for Gilbert’s father’s funeral. Anne and Diana have an afternoon to get away and visit all their old haunts, and we have a glimpse of Marilla and Mrs. Lynde and all the old scenes we love from the previous books. But as Anne heads back to Glen St. Mary, first she reflects on all she loves in Avonlea, but then her thoughts turn toward her waiting family, and she wonders how she could have been happy for a week without them. A joyous reunion introduces us to her little ones.

Many of the chapters are from the viewpoints of the children as they encounter various trials, tribulations, adventures, and misunderstandings. It’s so easy to forget how things can look to a child and how they might process them.

It’s sweet to see Anne’s motherly wisdom with her children and to see that though she has matured, she hasn’t lost her vivacity and imagination.  But lest we think she’s too perfect, she has her own misunderstanding with attendant negative feelings before it all works out in the end.

One of Anne’s trials in this book is a visit from Gilbert’s Aunt Mary Maria. Well, it’s supposed to be a visit, but it begins to look like she’s planning to stay indefinitely. She’s so unpleasant that little Jem asked, after he met her, whether they could laugh while she was there. There were so many little things that offended, so little Anne feels she shouldn’t complain, “and yet…it’s the little things that fret the holes in life…like moths…and ruin it” (p. 67). Yet they can’t ask her to leave for fear of causing great offense. The situation is finally resolved a bit comically though with the best intentions.

Perhaps the besetting sin of many women in LMM’s books is gossip, and my least favorite chapter was a record of the gossip shared during a Ladies’ Aid quilting session. I’ve actually known some people who avoided her books for that reason. But she doesn’t present gossip as acceptable: it’s often comical or tragic or at the very least a thorn in someone’s side, and the characters who are meant to be exemplary don’t engage in it.

Favorite quotes from the book:

“This is no common day, Mrs. Dr. Dear,” [Susan] said solemnly.

“Oh, Susan, there is no such thing as a common day. Every day has something about it no other day has” (p. 17).

From Rebecca Dew: “While we should not forget the Higher Things of Life good food is a pleasant thing in moderation” (p. 62).

While Anne and Jem are planting bulbs one fall day: “Isn’t it nice to be preparing for spring when you know you’ve got to face winter?” (p. 155).

While Anne was reflecting on the children growing and the changes happening and yet to come: “Well, that was life. Gladness and pain…hope and fear…and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart…learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn” (p. 214).

To a small daughter disappointed when reality was less than her imagination and who decides never to imagine again: “My dear foolish dear, don’t say that. An imagination is a wonderful thing to have…but like every gift we must posses it and not let it posses us” (p. 244).

Reflecting on the coming winter: “What would matter drifting snow and biting wind when love burned clear and bright, with spring beyond? And all the little sweetnesses of life sprinkling the road” (p. 277).

I enjoyed reading about Anne at this stage of her life.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

…the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge begins!

More information is here. I hope you’ll join us!