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.)