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.