Little House on the Prairie

I'd long been dreading this one. My ongoing disappointment with the lingering "children's literature" portion of my backlog has been well documented on the blog, and at 330 pages this book wasn't going to go down quickly. But earlier tonight, I cracked it open just to see what was in store. To my surprise, I gave it an honest read (minimal skimming) from cover to cover in only about two hours. It turns out large text and a number of pictures made up for the high page count. Nice. At any rate, I actually found myself enjoying, or at least not angrily hating, this book. We've all been given an inkling of what pioneer life was like back in the 1800s thanks to the likes of The Oregon Trail, and the twenty-odd easily digestible chapters in Little House on the Prairie fit into a familiar archetype. The semi-autobiographical book begins with the Ingalls family deciding to leave their little house in the Wisconsin woods to head out West. They settle in Kansas in the middle of Indian Territory, but the family patriarch is convinced that the government will push the Indians further west sooner or later. The government never does this, though, and the book ends with the family withdrawing from their titular little house on the prairie on the government's orders and heading back to the Wisconsin area. Maybe it's because of all the politics in the air as Election Day approaches, but I definitely noticed some strong libertarian vibes at play here, even though the tone in which the book was written seems completely apolitical and agenda-less. You've got a family that literally packs up everything it has and heads to the middle of nowhere, building a house and some stables and carving out a new life, aiding neighbors and in turn being aided by them. There's no law enforcement out here whatsoever, and the biggest threat is the potential hostility of the local Indian tribes. They suffer through tons of hardships like malaria and house fires and poison gas (seriously) and the continental temperature extremes from the blistering summer heat to the long frigid winter. But when this family begins to make everything work out without any outside assistance or protection, some bureaucrats in Washington decide that it's time for them to leave it all behind and get the hell off of that Indian land. I mean, doesn't that sound like an Ayn Rand short story? Doesn't the success of the Ingalls family, entirely responsible for their own well-being and livelihood, clash with our current lifestyle where everything is computerized and automated and co-dependent? I shit bricks when the power goes out for an hour or two; there's no chance in hell I'd be able to support a wife and three daughters if forced to live off the land with a gun and a bunch of traps, let alone build them a house to keep the wolves out at night. Yeesh. So anyway, yeah, I guess Little House on the Prairie actually made a small impact on me. I tip my cap to Laura Ingalls Wilder for succeeding where so many before her have failed, but I doubt I'll be checking out any of the other books in this series.