My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
This book is filled with wonderful episodes and, in my opinion, the best writing this late in the Little House series. Mary going blind, and the death of Jack, are well-known episodes; I had read them last year without continuing in the book, and their simple power holds you on second reading. Continuing into the … Continue reading By the Shores of Silver Lake
This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.* Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs. Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much … Continue reading On the Banks of Plum Creek
This is an utterly charming book, and I flew through it. As always, there was much detail about farm chores that I didn’t understand and which often left me bored. But some of that stuff in this book was mildly interesting (like cheesemaking); and none of it detracted from the pleasures of the book for … Continue reading Little House In the Big Woods
When we went into quarantine almost exactly a year ago and started home-schooling, I showed my kids a YouTube video about one-room schoolhouses of the past. Then I remembered the Walnut Grove schoolhouse from the TV series of “Little House On the Prairie”. I grew up watching that show every day back in the 1980s, … Continue reading The Long Winter
