I finished a number of books over the last few weeks and haven’t had time or inclination to do a full review of them, but I thought I’d talk about them just briefly here.

Last month I reviewed Vicious Cycle by Terri Blackstock, which was the second in a trilogy, so I went back and listened to the first book, Intervention, from an audiobook and then read the newest and last in the series, Downfall, with my Kindle app for the Touchpad and iPhone.

In Intervention, Barbara Covington’s daughter, Emily, is an out of control addict, and after trying everything else she could, Barbara pays for a treatment center out of state which sends an interventionist to take Emily to the center. But the interventionist is killed in the airport parking lot and Emily is missing. Did she kill the woman, or is she in danger as well?

In Downfall, the Covington family has moved to Atlanta for a new start, but trouble seems to follow them with an attempt to bomb Emily’s car and two murders of people from the new treatment  center where she works. Though she’s been clean, evidence begins point to her involvement. Has she relapsed, or is she being framed?

This series arose from a situation in Terri’s own family (addiction, not murders), and with Jim and I both having members of extended family who have had trouble with drugs, I found the struggles both Emily and her family faced to be very realistic. And if you like suspense, Terri’s your girl! Her characters are realistically flawed while seeking God’s will. I enjoyed both of these.

The Big 5-OH! by Sandra D. Bricker is the next birthday of Olivia Wallace, and Liv is convinced that something dreadful is going to happen because of her “birthday curse”: something has happened on every birthday she can remember, all the way from losing a boyfriend to blizzards to a cancer diagnosis. For a change of venue and outlook, her friend urges her to go to her mother’s (the friend’s mother’s) place in Florida while her mother visits her there in Ohio , so Liv takes her up on the offer. Besides taking care of a dog in a lampshade collar, finding an alligator in a pool, and having a flirty 80-year-old as a neighbor, Liv meets another neighbor with a “toothpaste commercial smile” and begins to wonder if this birthday will be the best yet. This book was light, cute, fun — a nice beach or vacation read or just a change of pace from “heavier” books. I had found it on a clearance table at the Christian bookstore, but Amazon and Christianbook.com both have e-version for free at the moment.

I read Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz with my youngest son, Jesse, after having read two other books by that author, Boyhood and Beyond: Practical Wisdom for Becoming a Man and Created For Work. Though this has a lot of good points to ponder, I didn’t like it quite as well as the first two. It just seemed a little wordy and not as focused. He spends several chapters on knowing God’s voice and hearing Him speak, and I disagreed with him on some points there (I am always instantly suspicious when people say, “God told me…” anything), but it provided a good foundation for a discussion with my son on different views of that. But overall the book has more good points on the topic of happiness, contentment, and their enemies than it has problems.

So…I think that about catches me up. 🙂

Have you read any good books lately?

In The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, a number of children answer an ad for “gifted children looking for special opportunities” and take a series of tests. Four children ultimately pass all the tests and are asked to help a Mr. Benedict, who designed the tests, on a special mission. The four children also happen to be orphans except for one who ran away from home. The children are:

Reynard (Reynie) Muldoon, who has a special knack for logic, solving puzzles, figuring out “trick” questions, thinking “outside the box.”

George (“Sticky”) Washington, who remembers everything he reads and is generally very nervous.

Kate Wetherall, the most physical of the group (having spent most of her life with the circus), an one-woman (or girl) MacGyver with an ever-present bucket of useful items, including a spyglass disguised as a kaleidoscope.

Constance Contraire, who is very…contrary, small, sleeps a lot, and argues even more. The reason for her contrariness isn’t revealed until the last chapter, and it’s hilarious. It makes her behavior all through the book make sense.

The children are asked to go on a dangerous but important mission to thwart an evil Ledroptha Curtain, a mission that only children could successfully accomplish (all manner of government officials have not seen the danger despite Mr. Benedict’s numerous attempts to inform them), and in the process learn about themselves, about how to work as a team, about how to face fears and extend themselves. I can’t tell you much more than that without giving too much away, and this book is best unfolded at its own pace (for that reason, I’d advise not reading the Wikipedia entry on it til you’re done — it has way too many spoilers).

I have to admit it took me a while to get into the book. I had heard it lauded so much I think I was expecting to be wowed within moments, but it took a while for it to grow on me. It’s not until 80 or so pages in that I began to get some inkling what was going on, and I thought the remaining 400+ pages were going to go by slowly. But the kids are in the same boat as the reader, so it takes a while first for the clues to fall into place and then to figure out what to do about them, and it does reach “hard to put down” status after a while. I have to admit I almost rolled my eyes a little at the “world domination through thought control” idea (which made me think of Pinky and the Brain), but that’s the stuff of many a children’s book and superhero story.

But these children are not superheroes. I love that they are very real. They are gifted in different ways, but they each have their own struggles, strengths, weaknesses, doubts. They have to learn to lean on each other, to seek guidance yet to think for themselves. I love when books bring a character beyond what they think they can do, like Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings or Abbie in Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie (one of my favorite children’s books).

Though the book is not written from a Christian viewpoint, there are several underlying truths in it (someone once said “All truth is God’s truth”). Carrie saw some parallels to spiritual warfare and to differently-gifted people working together as a cohesive whole in the church, and I can see that. There is also an underlying love of truth throughout the book and a resistance to evil. It disturbed me when the children had to both cheat and lie at a couple of points, but it was justified as something which one would do in warfare that one wouldn’t normally do, and I can see that as well.

The word “clever” kept coming to mind as I read this, both in the wordplay and in the writing. I had wondered, with the idea of thought control coming through television and radios, whether the book was some kind of allegory concerning technology or wasting brains with media, but Carrie’s research indicated the author wrote in “all in good fun” with the main message being “Kids are people, too.”

I think my children would have liked this book when they were younger. I think my oldest in particular would have liked it during his Encyclopedia Brown days. I think they’d like it now, actually. Like Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House books, it has great appeal to adults as well.

So…real, clever, interesting, fun, dramatic at points, all upon a bedrock of truth…I’d say those are components of a great book.

I guess because I spent so much time reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder for her reading challenge this past month. my mind is still buzzing with various thoughts about her life. I thought I’d share some of them here.

Ma. I identified with Ma a lot this time. Being the chief homemaker, I can’t imagine doing all she did in the conditions she did with such a good attitude. There may have been times alone with Pa that she tried to talk him out of a course of action, but overall the books seem to present her as a sweetly submissive wife and creative mother. Maybe she liked wandering and liked being away from civilization as much as he did, but I get the impression that was primarily his bent. I really respected that she did try to keep things as civilized as possible and taught the girls good manners and didn’t let them go “wild.” And I dearly love that the final touch, one of the things that made each new place “home” was setting her china shepherdess on the mantle.

Garth Williams was not the first Little House illustrator, but his illustrations are the ones probably most of us are familiar with. I loved reading that he traveled to every place that the Ingallses had lived, did extensive research, and even met with Laura — and that she liked his work.

Rose. I read a biography of Rose some years back and was very surprised that she was so different from her mother. I read that she had a much harder time with the family’s early poverty than her mother had had with hers. The Ingallses seemed to be the type of family where the kids would grow up and say “We were poor but we didn’t know it then.” It seemed adventurous. I wondered what made the difference in Rose’s perspective, if it was just her personality or what. I do think she was very sensitive. But she was also an only child: she didn’t have the built-in companionship of a playmate and peer to experience what she was experiencing. Plus, when the Ingallses were homesteading and such, other families were, too. I didn’t read this in the books yet this time around, but do remember when Laura and Mary went to school, they were teased because their dresses were shorter than everyone else’s. I don’t know if Laura was ashamed of that so much or if she was just annoyed, especially at Nellie Oleson. But it seemed to really bother Rose that her clothes were different from her school peers. She did develop spunk in other ways, though. There is speculation about how well she got along with her parents, particularly her mother, but I never saw anything in Laura’s writing so far that indicated any underlying animosity there. She visited Rose in San Francisco partly to see the Intentional Exposition (one of the books I got to read for next time is West From Home, Laura’s letters back to Almanzo about that trip) and she mentions her frequently in her columns. She was particularly pleased that adult Rose, by then a famous writer, said of her mother’s pie that she’d rather be able to make a pie like that than write a poem. Maybe there is more about their relationship in Rose’s writings. Maybe some day I’ll get to those, too.

The TV show. I did enjoy the Little House on the Prairie TV show. I think it was on during my later college and early married years. Though I dislike that it varied so much from the books, it did still contain a lot from them, and it was good wholesome entertainment for the most part. In some ways I enjoyed it more if I kept it separate in my mind from the books. But it did inspire new reading of the books and interest in Laura. From what I have read many of the Laura historical sites contain memorabilia from the show as well as Laura’s life. I got the DVDs of the first season of the show some time back through some special deal and meant to watch an episode or two for the challenge but never did.

Little House crafts. I didn’t do any Little House related crafts during this challenge, but I meant to share on my wrap-up post yesterday that some years ago I did do a sampler specifically inspired by reading the books. I guess young girls in those days did samplers to learn their stitches, and at the time I did this there was an abundance of sampler patterns.

Truthfully, now it is not my favorite piece, but it still brings back fond memories of that time. I really liked the Early American style of decorating then and also bought what is supposed to be an antique raisin rack (used to dry grapes til they became raisins) decoupaged with a Burpee seed label (I didn’t decoupage it — I bought it that way).

I keep them together in our family room.

I hope you’ve enjoyed thinking a little more about Laura with me, and I do promise I will move on to other topics soon. 🙂

It’s the end of February…and the end of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. I’ve tried to catch some of your reviews throughout the month.

I had been wanting to have some kind of give-away for those who have participated in the challenge, but wasn’t sure just what I wanted to do until I came across Laura’s Album: A Remembrance Scrapbook of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson. I just got it last week and was able to read through it in an evening. It is set up just like a scrapbook,  with photos of the family, of some of the houses, a sample of Mary’s handwriting in a letter after she was blind, etc. It also has a condensed history of Laura.

To enter the giveaway, you must have participated in the challenge in some way and leave a comment telling us how you did so: either let us know in the comments what you read and your thoughts about it, or share a link back to your blog, whether you wrote a wrap-up post or want to link to your reviews of the books you read (it’s fine if you have multiple links in a comment here, but WordPress’s spam catcher will likely think it is spam. But I do check my spam folder every day and will fish it out if it lands there.) I’ll draw a name for a winner a week from today, Wednesday, March 7.

The books I finished are:

I Remember Laura by Stephen W. Hines, reviewed here, a collection or articles and interviews of people who actually knew Laura.

Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, compiled and edited by Stephen Hines, a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles she wrote before starting the Little House books, reviewed here.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed here, the first book in the series.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed here, their year in “Indian Country.”

Laura’s Album: A Remembrance Scrapbook of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson, not reviewed.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, Laura fan extraordinaire, reviewed here.

I just got The Little House Cookbook by Barbara Walker last week but have only had time to flip through it a bit. I’m a little over halfway through Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines. I was disappointed that these are just columns from his previous book, but I guess for anyone who just wants an overview of this aspect of her life, it is nice to have them all in one place. I’ll have more to say about this book when I finish it.

My reading turned out to be a complementary mix of books by Laura and books about Laura, both old and new. A part of me really wants to keep going through the series, but I should probably save the rest of it for next year.

I have enjoyed immersing myself in Laura-related books this month. It gives a new insight to her. I should probably do this with other authors as well.

I shared in my review of The Wilder Life many new things I learned about Laura this month. There were several things I learned from I Remember Laura as well (among them, that Almanzo was 5’4″, Laura was even shorter, and they built their final home to their dimensions; that he preferred Laura on the other hand of a saw more than anyone else). That was interesting, but it was also cozy to reread the first two books in the Little House series. Each time through, at different ages and stages of life, I get different things or identify with different things from the book. I also learned of many Laura-related books I hadn’t known of before: I’ve gotten two already and am looking forward to exploring more next year.

Next year I’d also like to do something special on Laura’s birthday. I chose February for the challenge because Laura was born in February and then died in February a few days after her 90th birthday, but it didn’t even occur to me to mark that day especially until it arrived.

With this challenge just following Carrie‘s Lucy Maud Montgomery Challenge, one obvious difference between the two authors is that LMM is more more flowery in her descriptions. Laura tends to be more straightforward, yet her imagination isn’t less than LMM’s (she even had several magazine columns about fairies) — it’s just expressed differently. Perhaps the fact that she was writing primarily from real life made for a difference as well in her style.

I’ve always admired the sense of history, the strength of character, the love of family, the endurance of whatever life threw at them that comes through in Laura’s books.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you read and hearing your thoughts! Thanks so much for being a part of this challenge.

Update: The giveaway is now closed: congratulations to Kami! But feel free to continue to leave comments related to the challenge here if you’d like.

I thought about saving The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure until after I had read all the Little House books so the references would be fresh to me, but I’ve had it for a while and really wanted to complete it for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge, especially since some of the other participants were planning to read it, too.

I had won it from 5 Minutes For Books months ago, and Jennifer warned me it was “irreverent.” I wasn’t sure exactly what way that would play out, so that and the fact that I’d run into bad language and such in most anything modern and secular lately made me a little wary. There is a smidgen of bad language and a couple of unnecessary sexual references, but it was all much less than what I was afraid there would be, not that I’m brushing it off or condoning it.

The crux of the book is that Wendy loved the Little House books as a child, even having Laura as her imaginary friend whom she wanted to show her modern world, and then rediscovered them as an adult. She wanted to experience “Laura World,” so she read extensively, tried her hand at churning butter and preparing some recipes from the Little House cookbooks, and then she visited several of the LIW-related museums, homes, sites, pageants, and such. On the Ingalls Homestead she actually got to stay in a covered wagon overnight (for $50 at that time), complete with an electrical hookup and an unexpected hail storm (during which her significant other, Chris, asked “What about the wheat?” Loved that. There actually was wheat, corn, and oats growing at the time, which they checked out the next day, and it all seemed to be okay.) She even saw “Laura Ingalls Wilder: the Musical” with Melissa Gilbert (TV Laura) as Ma!

In some places she had some neat experiences, such as when Chris was reading one of the books, came across an illustration of the prairie, lifted up his eyes and realized he was seeing the exact same landscape depicted in the illustration, or when Wendy stepped into Plum Creek and recognized it from the books’ description. Other times there was a strange disconnect between Laura’s world that she was seeing and and the “Laura’s World” in her own mind, or the one she had thought she would see. She found some absurdities (like what sounded almost like a cult of people preparing for the “end times” by learning prairie ways) as well as some surprises, like the insight she found at Almanzo Wilder’s childhood home (the only home at all related to LIW still standing on its own foundation) when originally Farmer Boy, based on Almanzo’s early life, was her least favorite book in the series. It helped, too, to read in The Road Back, a kind of a travel diary of Laura’s rare visit back to De Smet, where the rest of her family lived, that Laura experienced her own disconnect with things being different from her childhood and missing the ones who had passed on (pp 296-297).

Wendy discusses as well some of the disputed things that came up in her reading and research: whether some of the books’ content was actually fictionalized, how much Laura’s daughter Rose had to do with the books, whether Pa did actually know that the land he was on in disputed Indian territory (here is where some of the irreverence comes in: she calls Pa an “opportunistic jerk.”)

Some of the quotes I found most interesting or insightful:

“I didn’t think of Laura’s life as history. It was more alive than that, and more secret, too” (p. 7).

Speaking of childhood road trips: “I hoped we’d come across the cabin the Ingallses abandoned at the end of Little House on the Prairie. We’d see it in the distance, waiting for someone to come back to it. I wanted that someone to be me: I wanted to find that door and open it and complete the story” (p. 8).

Quoting from Barbara Walker’s foreword to the Little House Cookbook: “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s way of describing her pioneer childhood seemed to compel participation” (p. 38).

She used to come into her room, “describing it’s details to herself as if I’d never seen them before…For a few moments my room felt enchanted, just from the power of observation I’d borrowed from Laura…The story of the Little House books was always a story of looking (p. 61).

“Sometimes when I hear folks maunder on about how simple Laura’s lifestyle was I wonder if they’ve ever thought about all the hauling and fetching and stowing and stoking it took just to boil a pot of water” (p. 165). (I have, too!)

“Sometimes, Laura World wasn’t a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn’t into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, of a life comfortably cluttered and yet in some kind of perfect fend shui equilibrium, where all the days were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate the wooded hills deep in thought” (p. 172).

I learned several new things, among them:

Rose suggested that when Laura’s character got too “old,” perhaps they should focus on Carrie as the main character now. Laura replied, “We can’t change heroines in the middle of the stream” (p. 98). I am SO glad they didn’t. I’m glad they followed through with Laura’s life as she grew older and married. (Plus I get really tired of the idea that kids can only relate to kids near their own age. And here I thought that was a new line of thought.)

There is a 2005 Disney version of the books on film.

Ed Friendly, who began the LH TV series, wanted to keep it close to the books, but Michael Landon wanted heartwarming, moral lesson type stories (which he actually could have had by sticking closer to the books…)

Rose Wilder Lane’s book Let the Hurricane Roar was written before the Little House books and took elements from different parts of the Ingallses history. Rose “hoped it would inspire Depression-era readers with its themes of resilience in the face of hardship and the strength of the American character” (p. 168). But I don’t think Laura had conceived of writing the books yet. Wendy has a good section on Rose in Chapter 6, “The Way Home.”

Wendy didn’t like adult Laura’s non-fiction writings as much as I did, and overall she writes from a secular, non-conservative, “postmodern” viewpoint. Everyone I’ve known who really loved the LH books was more conservative and religious, so it was interesting to see “Laura’s world” through that perspective. She can be snarky in tone, which won’t likely sit well with many. But overall this was a really interesting book of a dedicated Laura fan. She even started a Twitter account where she comments as Laura at @HalfPintIngalls.

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.

For such a short month, February has been an awfully full one! But then the fourth Tuesday of last month left us with a full week of January, so I guess we did get an extra reading week in there.

Here’s what I completed reading since the last Nightstand post:

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery, reviewed here.

Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery, reviewed here.

Vicious Cycle by Terri Blackstock  (audiobook), reviewed here.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett (audiobook), reviewed here.

I Remember Laura [Ingalls Wilder] by Stephen W. Hines, reviewed here.

Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, compiled and edited by Stephen Hines, a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles she wrote before starting the Little House books, reviewed here.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed here.

Little House on the Prairie is by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed here.

Laura’s Album: A Remembrance Scrapbook of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson, no reviewed.

Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz, with my youngest son, Jesse, not reviewed yet.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, just finished, hope to review in the next day or so. Review is up here.

I also listened to Silas Marner, but it wasn’t an audiobook as I had thought: it was an 111 minute production/adaptation. But it was very good! I will have to read the book some day.

Since I’ve been exploring audiobooks the past month or two, I wrote some thoughts on audiobooks, but basically I do prefer a real physical book in my hands for several reasons, yet audiobooks have been wonderful for driving time and other times when my hands are busy but my mind is free.

I am currently reading:

Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines. I was disappointed that these are just columns from his previous book, but I guess for anyone who just wants an overview of this aspect of her life, it is nice to have them all in one place.

Intervention by Terri Blackstock (audiobook).

I’m not sure what’s next. I’ve been pushing hard to get books completed for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge, which ends Wednesday, so I haven’t thought much about what to read beyond that. But I have The Big 5-Oh! by Sandra Bricker on my nightstand, and it looks like good. I’ve enjoyed Carrie‘s LMM and my LIW reading challenges immensely, but it will be nice to get back to modern times and a little more free-form reading this month.

When Pa feels that too many people are living in the Big Woods, he decides to take the family West into Indian country, ushering in quite an adventurous year for the Ingalls family.

They pack things up in a covered wagon, leaving major furniture behind “because Pa could always make more” (and I am sure because it would have taken another wagon just to load bigger things like beds and tables), say a poignant good-bye to grandparents and cousins without knowing when they would be able to communicate again, much less see them again, cross the frozen Mississippi River only the day before the ice starts to break, then endure traveling unnumbered days (with no DVDs, radios, iPods, or McDonald’s!) and make camp in a new place almost every night.

Finally they reach Kansas, where they see wide open space with “nothing but the rippling grass and the enormous sky” which seemed to curve over them in a perfect circle, quite a contrast to the Big Woods. But they traveled on still to Oklahoma, passing through a dangerous high creek in the process. I felt almost as sick as Laura said she felt til they were safely on the other side.

When they finally choose a spot to settle, then the long process of making a home begins: making a tent of the wagon covering, hauling logs, making the cut-outs at each end so they can stack together, making doors (without nails!!) Once again I was impressed with the industriousness and knowledge of both Ma and Pa as well as everyone’s bucking up under what we would consider hardship. I can’t quite imagine having a dirt floor or making beds on it: wouldn’t everything constantly get dusty? Yet everyone seems patient with the time it takes to get everything done step by step. When Pa is finally able to build a bed frame and they fill a straw tick with dry grass from the prairie (which almost makes me itchy just to think about), Ma says she is “so comfortable it’s almost sinful.”

The Ingalls had word that the Indians would soon be leaving, but there were still plenty of them around, giving Ma a fright when they would show up at her door and apparently want something to eat. Wolf packs, fire in the chimney and then on the prairie, “fever ‘n’ ague” (which Laura said later was probably malaria) which would likely have taken the whole family if someone had not come upon them when there were sick are just a few of the trials the family experienced. I could empathize with Ma’s long nights alone when Pa had to make the four-day trip back and forth to the nearest town.

And in this book we meet dear Mr. Edwards, one of my favorite characters, and have one of my favorite parts of the series during the Christmas he makes a trip at great hardship to himself so the girls can have Christmas — and they are so thrilled with the little gifts they receive.

There are a few remarks about Indians that we would consider racist today, but I think they were primarily motivated by fear. Pa tried to keep the peace and calm other neighbors’ excited feelings against the Indians. Other books I have been reading debate the controversy of settlers encroaching on Indian territory, but I don’t think most of the settlers had the big picture we do today in retrospect: most of them weren’t personally trying to run the Indians out: they just knew the government said there was land to be homesteaded.

Little House on the Prairie is a fascinating account of what I imagine many pioneer families dealt with in traveling in covered wagons and settling new territory. But even more than the historical interest, the warmth of the family and their character makes this book one of the most special children’s books written.