die_traumerei

Or: My Little House on the Prairie Phase

So it all started with reading Wendy McLure’s The Wilder Life, which is her musing about the Little House books and following, a little, in Laura’s footsteps -- or rather, exploring what Little House things she could do, and recapture how the books made her feel. I’ve loved Wendy’s writing for a long time and I loved the Little House books and I read basically all of this on a flight to Seattle to look for apartments, so the American myth of striking out West was...a thing that I suddenly got.

Okay, this book is good, and I loved it, and I loved hearing about her quest for the Laura life in a funny, good-natured, not-prepper way. It really resounded with me, and also really got me on a roll!

I’d read the first two Little House books in 2017, so kind of leapt in with On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Farmer Boy, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. Just a few of my observations (ugh this is why I’m doing stuff as I read this year, I had so many thoughts! I know I did!):

Laura’s writing is really, really, really beautiful and evocative. I want to spend the night alone on the prairie, to see what she saw. The books, language-wise and describing the landscape that’s changing and vanishing as Laura watches, are exquisitely written.

Laura’s pretty racist.

Ma is SUPER RACIST. Like, really deeply hates Natives and is also creepily libertarian (no I don’t think it was Rose, I think it was just that Ma was the racist, weird, super-boring Ayn Rand of the prairies.)

I skipped the scene with Pa in blackface because to say it’s uncomfortable is putting things lightly.

Mary’s kind of a drip.

My goodness they’re manifest destiny-licious.

The books definitely get worse as the series goes on. These Happy Golden Years is more a series of vignettes that answer questions like ‘what do you do at a house party in a small town in the middle of South Dakota?’  The Long Winter is still a grinding read and also CAP GARLAND.

Okay, so I don’t believe that Rose wrote the books, but honestly both she and her mother were just assholes about Independence and Taking Care of Ourselves and Not Helping Anyone even though they both got a shit ton of governmental assistance IN ADDITION TO STEALING LAND I MIGHT ADD and anyway these books are creepily libertarian. There’s a lot of weird subtext about being Free and how Farmers are the Best, and it’s just very, very weird and offputting.

Which leads me neatly into one of the best books I read last year, Prairie Fires. Caroline Fraser wrote the book I would have given my eyeteeth for as an obsessed Laura fan. This is a meticulous tracing of the routes Laura’s family actually took, and how they moved around and the greater world around them at the time. And then, of course, it’s the rest of Laura’s life, and it kind of turns into an accidental biography of Rose Wilder Lane, too? And Laura was pretty awful (Almanzo is basically the only person to come off well by the end, actually), and probably lived in a sundown town and was a massive asshole about kind of everything, but Rose. ROSE WAS THE WORST YOU GUYS. Rose was probably, at best, mentally ill and deeply untreated but also ROSE’S PERSONALITY IS ASSHOLE. Ohhhhh my goddddddd this book was so good.

Anyway, you should read it, and you should also read Ana Mardoll’s livetweet of her read of the book (the non-tweet collection starts here) which is GENIUS.

Oh apparently I also read Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life which I have no memory of probably because it was not openly juicy and full of tea.

(Also you can find videos on YouTube of Wendy McClure’s talks while she was promoting her book and they are delightful. I also found a really good one from someone who had done research into Mary’s life at the Iowa School for the Blind and that was really cool too.)

Anyway, in conclusion, the Little House books mean a lot to me but they define Problematic and honestly I’m not sure I’d give them to a child to read.

ETA: whoops, apparently Ana Mardoll is doing a Prairie Fires re-read! The link goes to her first read, but honestly I am very very excited about the re-read too!

I’ve done this every year for the past couple years, and in 2018 I finally reached my goal of reading 50 books! I attribute it to letting my New Yorker subscription lapse, honestly. I usually do little 1- or 2-sentence reviews of each book, for my fun and yours.

I think in 2019 I’ll do this as I read books, to be honest, maybe as part of my weekly roundup for writing? There are a lot of books I have no memory of, so maybe that will help.

The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux. Oh fuck I loved this! It’s his travelogue of taking the train across Asia, and it’s wonderful. He did it again recently, and I’ll have to read that soon. I love Theroux’s travel writing, and he captures a time pretty well now past.
The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert. This book is maybe longer than it needs to be, but I also found I liked it much more than I expected to. I picked it up because it’s basically set in an historic house quite close to where I lived in Philadelphia, and it was neat to know where everything was set. The book is better than that, though, and I loved it very much. The hero is perfectly imperfect.
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons. I’ve been meaning to read this FOREVER, because I love the movie so, so much. It’s a glorious send-up of the Rural Romantic Novel, and it’s bonkers and funny and I very much liked it. It’s got a lot more to it than the film did, I think, and is all the better for it.
City of Illusion, Planet of Exile, Rocannon’s World, Ursula LeGuin. I am determined to learn to love LeGuin. I should love her. I have zero memory of any of these books.
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado. Er. Well. This is awkward. I and the author have a friend in common. At one point we were introduced. This book has won All the Awards and I haaaaaated it. The title story is fine, but I couldn’t stand the others. They all seem to be about the same person, who felt passive and dull and the whole thing was like walking through porridge.
Just Looking: Essays on Art, John Updike. In which John Updike isn’t nearly as irritating as he could be. I wish I could remember better what he actually touched on, but I was surprised by how much I liked this.
Elmet, Fiona Mozley. In contrast to, er, every other famous book here, this was a Man Booker finalist and I would actually agree it earned that. It’s a creepy, sad, wild, happy story. It’s like the best of weird English stories, and although it’s not explicitly of the Terrifying Landscape genre, it’s not far from that either.
Craeft, Alex Langlands. Well, this is another awkward one. It opened with me basically yelling at the author on Twitter for being ableist. He very graciously responded and put a lot into context, and then followed me on Twitter which I still don’t know what he was thinking but there you go. I liked it! There’s a lot of good meditating on what makes craft, and what it means to be skilled – or to lose those skills, as a population.