I've had a simply exhausting week -- just the normal exhaustion with grading deadlines on top of it, which has meant not enough sleep for three nights running. And boy, do I feel it. At 44, one does not burn the candle at both ends. The candle burns you!
Be that as it may, utter and total exhaustion has its interesting moments. It sometimes seems to make me hear and see things with unusual clarity, followed (of course) by bouts of raucous giggling. Presidential debates, for instance, can seem a whole lot funnier and a lot less dire when you hear them in sleep-deprived condition. (Sometimes the lack of sleep can pitch me face first into despair...but just as often, it's likely to toss me off the cliff of hilarity. I prefer the latter.)
The other thing that seems to sharpen when I'm tired is my geekiness detector. I use geek here in the most loving way possible. One of the things that delights me about the world of the internet is that it introduces you to other people in the world who have crazy obsessions like your's. Well, sometimes like your's and sometimes quite different, but all in a similar "I just love to talk about this/read about this/research about this/spout fascinating facts about this" vein. I am particularly fond of finding fellow literary geeks, especially when their passions correspond at least somewhat with my own reading passions.
So I was delighted when, just yesterday, I stumbled across a blog called Wilder Weather. It's about...can you guess? can you? Yes, you can! It's about the weather in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, and seeing that such a blog exists made me absurdly happy. The blogger, Barbara Mayes Boustead, is serious about this stuff. She's a writer and history enthusiast who is also an honest to goodness meteorologist and climatologist and she loves tracking down cool facts about the weather in Wilder's books. Did you know that October 15th was the 131st anniversary of the blizzard that marked the beginning of the Long Winter? Now you do, and your life is richer because of it. I know mine is!
The weather in Laura's books has always fascinated me just as much as the food. I was the kind of kid who played "Long Winter" -- I would bundle myself up in blankets and eat bits of plain bread without any butter (I think I toasted it to make it dry and hard) while I imagined that the wind was howling outside and the snow pouring down and the trains couldn't possibly get through and we were all going to starve before spring. (Little literary geek. Yes.)
When I grew up, my ongoing fascination with the books, especially as my daughter grew old enough to read them/listen to them, got me interested in learning more about 19th century winters on the prairie. I ended up reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard (if you have any interest in the subject at all, this book is a must-read...please read my review at the link to see why). Then I turned to the amazing poems in Ted Kooser's The Blizzard Voices. I wrote about that book in a review titled "Small Poems Like Landmarks in a Storm."
So...my own geek credentials on this subject are pretty high, but not nearly as high as this delightful blogger who is working on a book (oh hooray) about Wilder Weather. As you can imagine, I plan to hunker down with that when it's finally published...probably while wrapped in a blanket and chomping on dry toast.
Showing posts with label Wilder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wilder. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Books About Books
Lately I seem to be on a tear of reading books about books. It started a couple of weeks back when I found A Jane Austen Education on the new book shelves at our little library. No sooner had I finished that than my copy of The Wilder Life hit the hold shelves two towns over.
I'm working on reviews of both, but I found myself wanting to jot a few thoughts here. These were both fascinating reads...highly different from one another in some essential ways, and yet similar too. They both seem to fall into the genre I'm coming to think of as literary memoir, or maybe "book lover's confessional" would be more appropriate.
A Jane Austen Education is subtitled "How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter." (In other words, "everything I need to know I learned from Jane...")
The Wilder Life (a title which could probably lead one into unintended trouble if googled indiscriminately) is subtitled "My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie."
Both books are written by highly literate and liberal folks -- good writers, very educated, with a deep love of story. William Deresiewicz, who used to teach at Yale, has the honor of being perhaps the most interesting male writer I've ever read on Austen. His book is about two-thirds thought-provoking literary criticism (he gives readings of all six of Austen's novels) and one-third memoir/confessional. What fascinates me most about this book, written from the perspective of a Jewish academic who seems mostly secular, is that his main thesis boils down to this: reading Jane Austen helped him to be a kinder, more compassionate, deeper human being. In fact, I think you could actually argue persuasively from his arguments that what he learned from Austen is the need for Christian virtues (and the beauty of holiness).
Wendy McClure, the author of the Wilder book, sounds even younger and hipper than Deresiewicz, whom I gather is about my age (hence not so young and hip anymore, though certainly not decrepit). She's also a lot less academic...though her impressive writer credentials include an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her prose style reminds me a bit of Anne Lamott, if one could ever imagine Anne Lamott wearing a sunbonnet and trekking across the prairie in an obsessive search for some elusive...something. That is, something that has to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her story, something that somehow might connect to the trekker's own story.
I have to admit I laughed out loud multiple times while reading The Wilder Life. I love (love, love) all the Little House books. I've loved them since childhood, and I've loved reading them all to my daughter (except for the First Four Years, which I've not been able to bring myself to put her through yet). McClure knows the books backwards and forwards, and it was easy to fall into a deep kinship with her experience of inhabiting the world of the books so deeply. I too inhabited Laura's story in my childhood. And whenever I enter the books again, I still feel like I do ~ an experience I've had many a time, not just with Wilder's work, but with other writers too, including Austen.
McClure talks about religion more overtly than Deresiewicz, though in a way that shows her discomfort with zealous people who take it too seriously ~ and while one can easily empathize with that, I found it interesting that she was scared off by religious zeal/passion when she was so good at showing so much of her own -- when it came to literature! She tries to be charitable, but she clearly feels ambiguous about how "Christian homeschoolers" (a group she tends to lump together without much differentiation) have approached Wilder's work. That made me chuckle, partly because I'm both a Christian and a homeschooler, and I would likely have some of the same concerns/critiques she has. Wilder has definitely been embraced by the wider homeschooling community, but not always for the reasons McClure assumes and most highlights. There's a tremendous diversity among homeschoolers, even faith-based ones, that she hasn't quite grasped...though it's hard to fault her for that since it's a common misperception.
What Deresiewicz and McClure have in common, despite their different voices and approaches, is that ability to fall completely into stories, to let stories change and shape them. They are passionate readers who have found not just artistry in the pages of books, but themselves. And they're passionate about sharing their insights about what they've learned in the process. Deresiewicz' journey is much more interior/cerebral, though the book takes a surprisingly personal turn in the final chapter as he relates his own story of courtship/love/marriage and gives it an Austen spin. McClure's journey is exterior as well as interior as she sets out on an actual pilgrimage to see as many Laura Ingalls Wilder "places" as she can, and as she tries to sort out the tensions between truth/fiction and the connections (and disconnects) between Laura's life and her own.
Both books also put me in mind of C.S. Lewis. Okay...a lot of books put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who has helped me learn how to read and think more deeply. (I sometimes feel like Jack hovers between the lines of most things I read, whispering encouragement and pointing out insights.) His words on "sehnsucht" (that deep yearning or craving for something beyond ourselves, something that often feels just out of reach) kept playing through my mind as I read these two authors. And they both seem to be living examples of Lewis' wonderful quote: "We read to know that we are not alone."
I'm working on reviews of both, but I found myself wanting to jot a few thoughts here. These were both fascinating reads...highly different from one another in some essential ways, and yet similar too. They both seem to fall into the genre I'm coming to think of as literary memoir, or maybe "book lover's confessional" would be more appropriate.
A Jane Austen Education is subtitled "How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter." (In other words, "everything I need to know I learned from Jane...")
The Wilder Life (a title which could probably lead one into unintended trouble if googled indiscriminately) is subtitled "My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie."
Both books are written by highly literate and liberal folks -- good writers, very educated, with a deep love of story. William Deresiewicz, who used to teach at Yale, has the honor of being perhaps the most interesting male writer I've ever read on Austen. His book is about two-thirds thought-provoking literary criticism (he gives readings of all six of Austen's novels) and one-third memoir/confessional. What fascinates me most about this book, written from the perspective of a Jewish academic who seems mostly secular, is that his main thesis boils down to this: reading Jane Austen helped him to be a kinder, more compassionate, deeper human being. In fact, I think you could actually argue persuasively from his arguments that what he learned from Austen is the need for Christian virtues (and the beauty of holiness).
Wendy McClure, the author of the Wilder book, sounds even younger and hipper than Deresiewicz, whom I gather is about my age (hence not so young and hip anymore, though certainly not decrepit). She's also a lot less academic...though her impressive writer credentials include an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her prose style reminds me a bit of Anne Lamott, if one could ever imagine Anne Lamott wearing a sunbonnet and trekking across the prairie in an obsessive search for some elusive...something. That is, something that has to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her story, something that somehow might connect to the trekker's own story.
I have to admit I laughed out loud multiple times while reading The Wilder Life. I love (love, love) all the Little House books. I've loved them since childhood, and I've loved reading them all to my daughter (except for the First Four Years, which I've not been able to bring myself to put her through yet). McClure knows the books backwards and forwards, and it was easy to fall into a deep kinship with her experience of inhabiting the world of the books so deeply. I too inhabited Laura's story in my childhood. And whenever I enter the books again, I still feel like I do ~ an experience I've had many a time, not just with Wilder's work, but with other writers too, including Austen.
McClure talks about religion more overtly than Deresiewicz, though in a way that shows her discomfort with zealous people who take it too seriously ~ and while one can easily empathize with that, I found it interesting that she was scared off by religious zeal/passion when she was so good at showing so much of her own -- when it came to literature! She tries to be charitable, but she clearly feels ambiguous about how "Christian homeschoolers" (a group she tends to lump together without much differentiation) have approached Wilder's work. That made me chuckle, partly because I'm both a Christian and a homeschooler, and I would likely have some of the same concerns/critiques she has. Wilder has definitely been embraced by the wider homeschooling community, but not always for the reasons McClure assumes and most highlights. There's a tremendous diversity among homeschoolers, even faith-based ones, that she hasn't quite grasped...though it's hard to fault her for that since it's a common misperception.
What Deresiewicz and McClure have in common, despite their different voices and approaches, is that ability to fall completely into stories, to let stories change and shape them. They are passionate readers who have found not just artistry in the pages of books, but themselves. And they're passionate about sharing their insights about what they've learned in the process. Deresiewicz' journey is much more interior/cerebral, though the book takes a surprisingly personal turn in the final chapter as he relates his own story of courtship/love/marriage and gives it an Austen spin. McClure's journey is exterior as well as interior as she sets out on an actual pilgrimage to see as many Laura Ingalls Wilder "places" as she can, and as she tries to sort out the tensions between truth/fiction and the connections (and disconnects) between Laura's life and her own.
Both books also put me in mind of C.S. Lewis. Okay...a lot of books put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who has helped me learn how to read and think more deeply. (I sometimes feel like Jack hovers between the lines of most things I read, whispering encouragement and pointing out insights.) His words on "sehnsucht" (that deep yearning or craving for something beyond ourselves, something that often feels just out of reach) kept playing through my mind as I read these two authors. And they both seem to be living examples of Lewis' wonderful quote: "We read to know that we are not alone."
Friday, February 11, 2011
Happy Land
At the end of this hard week, how wonderful was it to open up a musical treasure from the library hold shelf? This morning we played songs from Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was entranced as these wonderful songs (all of them referenced in the Little House books) rolled out of the player, some of them sounding just like I imagined them sounding when played by Pa Ingalls. A few I know from other sources, but many I only know because of "hearing" Pa play and sing them in the books.
Dancing in the kitchen to "Arkansas Traveler" with my husband at lunchtime, inventing harmonies for the "Sweet By and By" while listening with the sweet girl this morning...I just really needed this today. Beautiful fiddle music, beautiful bright bits of Americana.
You can see the disc I'm talking about here.
And oh, I needed the old-time hymns especially. Doesn't this lyric make your heart soar?
To our bountiful Father above, we will offer the tribute of praise;
For the glorious gift of His Love, and the blessings that hallow our days.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
(Joseph Philbrick Webster - tune; Sanford Fillmore Bennett - words)
Dancing in the kitchen to "Arkansas Traveler" with my husband at lunchtime, inventing harmonies for the "Sweet By and By" while listening with the sweet girl this morning...I just really needed this today. Beautiful fiddle music, beautiful bright bits of Americana.
You can see the disc I'm talking about here.
And oh, I needed the old-time hymns especially. Doesn't this lyric make your heart soar?
To our bountiful Father above, we will offer the tribute of praise;
For the glorious gift of His Love, and the blessings that hallow our days.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
(Joseph Philbrick Webster - tune; Sanford Fillmore Bennett - words)
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Reader Girl in January
The sweet girl announced at breakfast this morning: "Hot chocolate, warm cinnamon toast, and The Long Winter. Those are my goals for today."
Good, attainable goals. And a reader girl after my own heart.
Happy Epiphany!
Good, attainable goals. And a reader girl after my own heart.
Happy Epiphany!
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Book Notes: Children's Lit Version
I've been swamped, overwhelmed, tired...and my writing rhythm (here as elsewhere) has been ragged at best.
But yes, I do still read!
And on a blog called Endless Books, I do still love to talk about books. So here are a few (very) random musings on reading from the past week or two. For this post, I'll stick to children's literature I've read, and also family read-alouds. Grown-up fare coming in another post soon.
* Erin was right. I loved The Mother-Daughter Book Club, a mid-grade novel (first in a series) by Heather Vogel Frederick. It's light, fun fare for the middle school girl crowd, a book that pays loving homage to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, one of the books of my heart. It might even possibly inspire a contemporary girl to read LW, if she's not normally too excited about 19th century literature, but my guess is that this book and the subsequent ones in the series, which pay tribute to other classic books, will fare best with girls who already love reading those kinds of books. Not to mention their moms. And of course, it made me long to start a mother-daughter book club, except that we know hardly any moms with girls anywhere remotely near the sweet girl's age right now.
* The Little House weeks appear to have drawn to a close. We read Long Winter followed immediately by Little Town on the Prairie, mostly because the sweet girl begged to. We usually take a break in between series books, but she's been on such a Laura Ingalls Wilder kick, I didn't have the heart to say no...plus it was too much fun to resist. Little Town is not my favorite book in the series, but it is an important bridge between two books that are: Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years. I am thinking the latter might make a good Christmas present for the sweet girl, since (oddly) it appears to be the only Little House book we don't own a copy of. We most usually have multiple copies, or at least doubles, but I seem to have misplaced my childhood copy of Golden Years and I guess we never picked up a newer copy at Half-Price books.
* While on the Little House kick, we had fun looking at some Laura Ingalls Wilder websites. I also thought it might be fun for the sweet girl to watch an episode or two of the Little House television series from my childhood, so I put the first season DVD set on hold. It arrived, and she immediately squelched that idea: "I don't think it will be anything like the books." Well, she's right about that, so I didn't push it, but D. and I had fun watching the first regular season episode last night, despite neither of us having any time to watch anything lately. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry: the series brought back such sweet memories (well, for me, at least) but the characters are so *not* the characters we know and love from the books. Michael Landon is charming, but he's just not Pa, is he? (Does he ever play the fiddle on the show? I can't recall...) We also found ourselves falling into fits of laughter over the California landscape (rugged hills and lots of old trees) trying to masquerade as Minnesota prairie. The sheer sentimentality of the show I had almost forgotten, though I did find myself almost tearing up at the end when the Ingalls realized the strength of their new community. But that probably has more to do with my own longing for deeper community right now than it does with the show's script or acting.
* "I need to find lots of things!" the sweet girl announced plaintively the other evening. She's been on the lookout for things she can "borrow" for the small dollhouse doll she has recently renamed Arriety. Yes, we're reading Mary Norton's The Borrowers for family read-aloud. I'd forgotten what a delight it is!
* Melissa Wiley went to Mankato. Isn't that awesome? I've been longing to go there for years, and it was such fun to see it through her eyes. The new issues of Carney's House Party/Winona's Pony Cart (with Melissa's foreword) and Emily of Deep Valley were released a few weeks ago. I especially love Emily and Carney, and hope to add these beautiful new editions to my collection soon.
But yes, I do still read!
And on a blog called Endless Books, I do still love to talk about books. So here are a few (very) random musings on reading from the past week or two. For this post, I'll stick to children's literature I've read, and also family read-alouds. Grown-up fare coming in another post soon.
* Erin was right. I loved The Mother-Daughter Book Club, a mid-grade novel (first in a series) by Heather Vogel Frederick. It's light, fun fare for the middle school girl crowd, a book that pays loving homage to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, one of the books of my heart. It might even possibly inspire a contemporary girl to read LW, if she's not normally too excited about 19th century literature, but my guess is that this book and the subsequent ones in the series, which pay tribute to other classic books, will fare best with girls who already love reading those kinds of books. Not to mention their moms. And of course, it made me long to start a mother-daughter book club, except that we know hardly any moms with girls anywhere remotely near the sweet girl's age right now.
* The Little House weeks appear to have drawn to a close. We read Long Winter followed immediately by Little Town on the Prairie, mostly because the sweet girl begged to. We usually take a break in between series books, but she's been on such a Laura Ingalls Wilder kick, I didn't have the heart to say no...plus it was too much fun to resist. Little Town is not my favorite book in the series, but it is an important bridge between two books that are: Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years. I am thinking the latter might make a good Christmas present for the sweet girl, since (oddly) it appears to be the only Little House book we don't own a copy of. We most usually have multiple copies, or at least doubles, but I seem to have misplaced my childhood copy of Golden Years and I guess we never picked up a newer copy at Half-Price books.
* While on the Little House kick, we had fun looking at some Laura Ingalls Wilder websites. I also thought it might be fun for the sweet girl to watch an episode or two of the Little House television series from my childhood, so I put the first season DVD set on hold. It arrived, and she immediately squelched that idea: "I don't think it will be anything like the books." Well, she's right about that, so I didn't push it, but D. and I had fun watching the first regular season episode last night, despite neither of us having any time to watch anything lately. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry: the series brought back such sweet memories (well, for me, at least) but the characters are so *not* the characters we know and love from the books. Michael Landon is charming, but he's just not Pa, is he? (Does he ever play the fiddle on the show? I can't recall...) We also found ourselves falling into fits of laughter over the California landscape (rugged hills and lots of old trees) trying to masquerade as Minnesota prairie. The sheer sentimentality of the show I had almost forgotten, though I did find myself almost tearing up at the end when the Ingalls realized the strength of their new community. But that probably has more to do with my own longing for deeper community right now than it does with the show's script or acting.
* "I need to find lots of things!" the sweet girl announced plaintively the other evening. She's been on the lookout for things she can "borrow" for the small dollhouse doll she has recently renamed Arriety. Yes, we're reading Mary Norton's The Borrowers for family read-aloud. I'd forgotten what a delight it is!
* Melissa Wiley went to Mankato. Isn't that awesome? I've been longing to go there for years, and it was such fun to see it through her eyes. The new issues of Carney's House Party/Winona's Pony Cart (with Melissa's foreword) and Emily of Deep Valley were released a few weeks ago. I especially love Emily and Carney, and hope to add these beautiful new editions to my collection soon.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Patchwork Post
Just a few patches from the crazy quilt of recent days...SICK
If you were a little flummoxed by yesterday's brief post, or if you've been wondering where the heck I've been, it can all be summed up in one word: SICK.
And what an odd round of sickness it's been. It started almost a week ago when I discovered I'd done a mysterious something to my back. Terrible muscle spasms, not being able to bend or walk without real pain, and it felt worst while sitting in (or getting up from) my desk chair at the computer.
It got so bad late Thursday-into-Friday that I really couldn't walk or lie down without terrible spasms radiating from my lower back into my right hip. In desperation, I strayed from my normal natural homeopathic path (a good path, by the way) and slathered myself in the menthol Icy Hot ointment. And then (in a haze of pain) completely disregarded package directions and put moist heat on top of it, which must have made the stuff absorb into my skin incredibly deeply.
Note, if you think you might have the slightest allergy to salicylates, don't do what I did.
So the result was several days of some of the worst hives I've ever had, and believe me, I've had some doozies.
Then the weather turned chilly and it started pouring rain, and I started my annual autumn bout of congestion/cough. And the cough seemed to strain my starting-to-heal back, which gave me a couple more bad days (though not quite as bad) with my back.
And then yesterday I couldn't bear the hives anymore...they didn't seem to be responding to the homeopathic remedy I was trying...so I switched to another remedy and also gave in and took Benadryl.
Which proceeded to knock me flat for most of the day. SoI was either sleeping, fighting sleep, or wishing I was sleeping...
Hence my post about not teaching while under the influence!
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"SALVE, MAGISTRA!"
That was the sweet girl's enthusiastic greeting to me the other day. Yes, we've been studying the first few lessons in Prima Latina.
I'm glad we decided to take the gentle route with Latin this year. It's been a good, slow beginning for us, just what we needed. I'm having a hard time getting in all the things we want to do, but including one PL lesson per week has been easy peasy and such an enjoyment for all of us. We couldn't afford the DVDs, but we like the audio CD. The woman who narrates the vocabulary has such a sweet southern inflection.
One of the nice things about Prima Latina is its inclusion of Latin prayers. We've been working on memorizing the Sanctus. The sweet girl's favorite word from her lessons so far is "Oremus" -- "let us pray." She often uses it as our call to prayer at dinner time or candles!
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LIVING WITH THE EARLY CHURCH
Being sick has at least afforded me some opportunity to read, and read I must if I'm going to keep ahead of the curve as I help teach the Early Church course for the seminary. It's been so good to dive back into the apostolic and sub-apostolic periods (the course runs from NT church up through Chalcedon). So I'm spending a lot of waking hours in the company of folks like Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus and Justin Martyr.
Good company...probably some quotes/posts forthcoming.
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"FASCINATING," said Mr. Spock, with his eyebrow raised.
Although we've had almost no time to breathe, much less watch movies, Dana and I continue our meander through the Netflix provided season 1 of the original Star Trek. What a great show...and what memories it brings back (mostly of watching them in re-runs in the 70s, along with my big brother).
I've always been fond of Bones (given my maiden name, probably understandable) but I'm really finding myself drawn to Spock lately. Hmm...
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RECIPES FROM THE ROOT CELLAR
I have fallen in love with this cookbook by Andrea Chesman, which I found recently on the "just-in" shelves at our library. It's subtitled "270 Fresh Ways to Enjoy Winter Vegetables" and although I've only tried 2 of the recipes so far, I feel game to try as many as I can from the other 268. I LOVE winter vegetables, and this book has offered some wonderful ideas for using them. Full of yummy ideas using potatoes, squashes, dark greens, carrots and other root veggies (not to mention apples).
So far I've made the Italian Wedding Soup with kale (really good, though I'd like to try it with a veggie chicken broth next time...all I had on hand was regular veggie broth) and Rumbledethump (fell in love with the name!) a casserole dish based on a recipe for Scottish colcannon.
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FEELING LIKE MA INGALLS
I joked that cooking up such a hearty Scottish dish (made with potatoes, onions, and cabbage) made me feel a little like Ma Ingalls. But I've got Ma and all the rest of the Ingalls on the brain anyway, since we have been having a Little House festival of reading this fall. Unplanned, but delightful...we finished Long Winter the other day and launched immediately into Little Town. We've been saving the reading for bedtime so Pa...er, Daddy...can join the fun.
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BOOK REVIEWS!
Oh, do I miss writing book reviews. It's funny that a writing pastime that began on a whim several years ago has become such a delight of my heart, but I do loving writing book reviews. And I'm currently in a major review writing drought -- not for lack of books, but serious lack of time (busiest schedule ever this fall, compounded by health stuff lately...)
In addition to all the books I've read recently that are piling up on my desk (and beckoning me to write about them) yesterday I got a package of books to review from Greenwillow Press, imprint of Harper Collins. It's only the second time I've had a publisher directly send me books to review, and I have to confess, though it sounds silly, that I felt like a real reviewer as I oohed and aahed my way through these beautiful books I get to read, share about and keep. You would think almost 900 written and posted reviews online would make me feel like a real book reviewer already, wouldn't you? But we writers are funny creatures...
Many more patches I could share, but dinner calls.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Sister Lit
Earlier today I posted a review of Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth book in the Little House series. And one that I always forget how much I love until I read it again.
As I was writing, I found myself thinking about the way Laura and Mary's relationship shapes the narrative. This is the book in which we discover that Mary has become blind, the consequence of scarlet fever. It's also the book where Pa tells Laura, more than once, that she needs to "become Mary's eyes." And so Laura, ever dutiful, truly takes that task on. She describes everything she sees out there on the Dakota prairie to her sister, often in incredible detail.
As the sweet girl and I were reading the book through, we talked about that -- about the way in which Laura learned to describe things vividly and with such care. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the real-life experience of being a companion to her blind sister probably helped to shape the kind of writer that Wilder became, the writer who loves to pour on detail after detail so that we "see" right along with her.
The Laura-Mary relationship of Little House has always been one of the cores of the series for me. It colors so much, from the way Laura compares her own mischievous behavior to Mary's ladylike behavior when they're little girls, to the ways in which Laura tends to ally herself with Pa's adventurous wandering spirit over against the gentler, more domestic instincts of Ma and Mary, right down through their deepening friendship as Laura "becomes her eyes" and later works hard as a school-teacher to help provide Mary the opportunity to study in a special college. I've often felt that Mary's patient forbearance always seemed almost too good to be true, and wondered if Laura didn't overly-sentimentalize this portrait of her sister...though maybe not. Maybe Mary really did have those deeply-engrained virtues. And certainly Laura's loving respect for this sister, so different from her herself, shines through.
I'd never made the connection until this evening, but it struck me that the Laura-Mary relationship has a prelude in the Jo-Beth relationship of Little Women (with perhaps a dash of the Jo-Amy relationship sprinkled into the earlier books). Beth too suffered through scarlet fever, and though it didn't leave her blind, it left her heart so weak she became an invalid. Beth too is portrayed, far more than Mary even, as a real saint, especially in the midst of such suffering. Her loss is the turning point in Jo's character development and story. And of course, like Wilder's stories, Alcott's were based on her real family and growing up years, with her sister portraits based on her real sisters.
Sister literature is powerful, isn't it? Austen delved deeply into it too, though her stories were much less overtly autobiographical. But Jane too had a sister she loved deeply, Cassandra, and I've sometimes wondered how much of their relationship seeped into the storied relationships of Elizabeth-Jane and Elinor-Marianne. So many people see romance as the beating heart of every Austen novel, but to me, it often seems as those the sister relationships are the real core, especially in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
When you contemplate sister lit, what fictional sister pairings come to mind for you?
As I was writing, I found myself thinking about the way Laura and Mary's relationship shapes the narrative. This is the book in which we discover that Mary has become blind, the consequence of scarlet fever. It's also the book where Pa tells Laura, more than once, that she needs to "become Mary's eyes." And so Laura, ever dutiful, truly takes that task on. She describes everything she sees out there on the Dakota prairie to her sister, often in incredible detail.
As the sweet girl and I were reading the book through, we talked about that -- about the way in which Laura learned to describe things vividly and with such care. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the real-life experience of being a companion to her blind sister probably helped to shape the kind of writer that Wilder became, the writer who loves to pour on detail after detail so that we "see" right along with her.
The Laura-Mary relationship of Little House has always been one of the cores of the series for me. It colors so much, from the way Laura compares her own mischievous behavior to Mary's ladylike behavior when they're little girls, to the ways in which Laura tends to ally herself with Pa's adventurous wandering spirit over against the gentler, more domestic instincts of Ma and Mary, right down through their deepening friendship as Laura "becomes her eyes" and later works hard as a school-teacher to help provide Mary the opportunity to study in a special college. I've often felt that Mary's patient forbearance always seemed almost too good to be true, and wondered if Laura didn't overly-sentimentalize this portrait of her sister...though maybe not. Maybe Mary really did have those deeply-engrained virtues. And certainly Laura's loving respect for this sister, so different from her herself, shines through.
I'd never made the connection until this evening, but it struck me that the Laura-Mary relationship has a prelude in the Jo-Beth relationship of Little Women (with perhaps a dash of the Jo-Amy relationship sprinkled into the earlier books). Beth too suffered through scarlet fever, and though it didn't leave her blind, it left her heart so weak she became an invalid. Beth too is portrayed, far more than Mary even, as a real saint, especially in the midst of such suffering. Her loss is the turning point in Jo's character development and story. And of course, like Wilder's stories, Alcott's were based on her real family and growing up years, with her sister portraits based on her real sisters.
Sister literature is powerful, isn't it? Austen delved deeply into it too, though her stories were much less overtly autobiographical. But Jane too had a sister she loved deeply, Cassandra, and I've sometimes wondered how much of their relationship seeped into the storied relationships of Elizabeth-Jane and Elinor-Marianne. So many people see romance as the beating heart of every Austen novel, but to me, it often seems as those the sister relationships are the real core, especially in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
When you contemplate sister lit, what fictional sister pairings come to mind for you?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Wilder Land
We've been languishing a bit in read-aloud time recently. After the sublime heights of The Magician's Nephew, we came down with a prosaic thud. I let the sweet girl choose our last book, and she went with one of the Boxcar Children sequels.
Now I don't mind the Boxcar Children on principle, and even thought the first one was a pretty good story. I also think kids should be able to indulge in a little light pulp reading now and again, just like grown-ups. But as read-alouds the sequels are mind-numbingly boring. Benny and Henry are particularly grating on my nerves; I begin to have sympathy for readers who found Bobby Belden's character so thoroughly annoying. Puh-leeze (as Bobby would say) let these kids grow up!
But today we moved back into literary territory, brighter and wilder terrain. Literally Wilder terrain: we're up to the fifth book in the Little House series with By the Shores of Silver Lake.
And I'd forgotten what a whammy those first two chapters give us. A couple of years or so have passed for Laura and family, still living on Plum Creek in these opening pages. Pa has that wild glint in his eye which can only mean one thing: time to pack the wagon and head west again! The family has weathered scarlet fever and Mary is now blind, a sad and sobering fact that seemed to hit the sweet girl hard. We talked a bit about how Laura "became Mary's eyes" (as the story tells us) and how that might be one reason why she grew up to be such a fine writer of description.
And then came the death of Jack. Dear old Jack, the family bull-dog, the one who has stood by Laura and the rest of the Ingalls through wolves and fires and grasshoppers and who knows what all else. I always forget this is coming, and I always have the hardest time in the world reading the description of Jack's last hours over the lump in my throat. How poignant that he lay down and died on the night before the wagon was to pull out and head west again, after all the many miles he walked.
When it comes to read-alouds, I like being back in Wilder Land. Even when it makes me cry.
Now I don't mind the Boxcar Children on principle, and even thought the first one was a pretty good story. I also think kids should be able to indulge in a little light pulp reading now and again, just like grown-ups. But as read-alouds the sequels are mind-numbingly boring. Benny and Henry are particularly grating on my nerves; I begin to have sympathy for readers who found Bobby Belden's character so thoroughly annoying. Puh-leeze (as Bobby would say) let these kids grow up!
But today we moved back into literary territory, brighter and wilder terrain. Literally Wilder terrain: we're up to the fifth book in the Little House series with By the Shores of Silver Lake.
And I'd forgotten what a whammy those first two chapters give us. A couple of years or so have passed for Laura and family, still living on Plum Creek in these opening pages. Pa has that wild glint in his eye which can only mean one thing: time to pack the wagon and head west again! The family has weathered scarlet fever and Mary is now blind, a sad and sobering fact that seemed to hit the sweet girl hard. We talked a bit about how Laura "became Mary's eyes" (as the story tells us) and how that might be one reason why she grew up to be such a fine writer of description.
And then came the death of Jack. Dear old Jack, the family bull-dog, the one who has stood by Laura and the rest of the Ingalls through wolves and fires and grasshoppers and who knows what all else. I always forget this is coming, and I always have the hardest time in the world reading the description of Jack's last hours over the lump in my throat. How poignant that he lay down and died on the night before the wagon was to pull out and head west again, after all the many miles he walked.
When it comes to read-alouds, I like being back in Wilder Land. Even when it makes me cry.
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