Little house of book collections

I'm decluttering at the moment. I gave 11 books to Ron for his second hand stall this morning. I've since set aside four more for charity shops, and six to lend out. So I allowed myself one freebie acquisition: By the shores of silver lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, to complement my slow rebuilding of the childhood collection.

I was raised on these Pioneer tales, not the TV series. The attitudes towards Native Americans are dated now, but what is undeniable is that the family endured hardship, death of children, and plagues of locusts. In the later book, The First Four Years, by Rose Wilder Lane, compiled from her mother Laura's (posthumous) notebooks, plague after plague is endured until the young married couple Laura and Almanzo finally up sticks and move to the Ozarks, where life, and farming, is easier, thank goodness.

My mother was an inveterate reader of bedtime stories. She definitely read us Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, and several more volumes, but I soon began reading ahead. I did that with my school reading books too. I've reread the entire series since, at least once.

Rightly or wrongly, those books sparked my eight year old imagination and became part of me in a bigger way than any tales of fantasy or magic, though I adored those too. Like many a little girl, I was Laura, crossing the prairie in a covered waggon; getting covered with leeches at Plum creek; crikey, I even became a teacher! I can truthfully say, though, that my house has never been besieged and I've only ever seen locusts in a heated tank.

For a further discussion of the books in the series, see the excellent book, The Child that Books Built, by Francis Spufford. I shall read that again before re-embarking on this series. It's a vast relief to have finished reading the Go Between for my WEA class, and to have finished the short stories course too. My reading time is my own again. Come November, I'll be doing two "reading courses" again, but that's quite a few months away.