Little House on the Prairie
by Laura Ingalls Wilder · first published 1935
7% recommend87% neutral7% critical
When Laura Ingalls and her family leave their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, they head west for the open prairie skies of Kansas Territory. They travel for many days in their covered wagon until they find the perfect spot for Pa to build them a new home. Soon they are planting and plowing, hunting wild ducks and turkeys, and gathering grass for their cows. But just when they begin to feel settled, they are caught in the middle of a dangerous conflict. Based on the real-life adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie is the third book in the award-winning Li
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I enjoyed My Father's Dragon so much! Also the Little House on the Prairie books, and then when she's a little older, everything by Tamara Pierce.
on “Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention” ↗I would also suggest the childrens books Cheaper by the Dozen, The Musicians of Brennan, Morris' Disappearing Bag and The Red Badge of Courage. I'd maybe throw in some of the little house on the prairie books as well, especially the one where they all almost froze to death. I think being able to appreciate books as an adult is pretty contingent on being exposed to good books as a youth.
on “How to live an intellectually rich life” ↗When my kids were beginning to read, we brought out the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little house on the Prairie etc). For our international readers, the books are autobiographical, and she grew up in the North Woods of the central US in the late 19th century. Reading them as an adult really impressed me that her…
on “Could Rome have had an industrial revolution?” ↗…been "old growth" unmanaged grassland, and "pastureland" that is mostly seeded with purchased grass and clover seed. Certainly the old prairies do not exist in any meaningful sense. If you ever read Little House on the Prairie you might recall that they traveled for weeks across grassland that was uninterrupted and looked simply like a flat sea of grass for as far as the eye could see. In any case, even if those numbers are…
on “Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)” ↗…California. But wages in California were good, and California went 50 years without a recession -- from the 1930s to the 1980s was one long continuous boom. Going back further, consider the events described in Little House On The Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder's family faced ruin after locusts ate all the food that the family was growing. So her father went away for awhile and found work where he was paid $1 a day. And that was enough…
on “Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble” ↗I was very interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was younger, as a result of reading her Little House on the Prairie books. An anecdote about her father, Charles “Pa” Ingalls drinking from the saucer always stayed with me. Thanks for teaching me that saucer drinking is still alive and well. https://henscratches.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/wilder-wednesd...
on “Saffron as an Antidepressant (2018)” ↗…Sanders started KFC at 65, and sold it 9 years later. * Harriette Thompson ran her first marathon at 76. * Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was 78. * Laura Ingalls Wilder began writing "Little House on the Prairie" at age 65. * Estelle Getty (Golden Girls) struggled as an actress for nearly 40 years until she finally had her breakthrough role in Torch Song Trilogy at almost 60 years of age.
on “Ask HN: How do I stop being such a doomer?” ↗…ideology, could often be simultaneously generous to others that they perceived to be in need. I think a source of unhappiness in the USA might be loneliness. To be honest, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little house on the prairie" series, while that sounds idyllic in a way, it also sounds lonely and hard work to me. So, some sources of lower happiness in the USA in terms of lack of community, might be deep-rooted? (some off the…
on “U.S. No Longer Ranks Among 20 Happiest Countries” ↗…young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65. I just don’t understand the point of this article other than to transmit bad vibes.
on “Youth and what happens when it's gone” ↗…young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65. Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or…
on “Youth and what happens when it's gone” ↗…maybe the total cost is US$3400, including materials and labor. So the cost of labor isn't the problem. Something has gone terribly wrong with your civilization. — ⁂ — I reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie last month, and I was struck by the description of the building process. If we take the description in the book as factual (not everything in the book is, but I assume in this case Ingalls Wilder was…
on “California affordable housing is more expensive than luxury housing” ↗…in their culture everyone knew how to make everything. There was a division between men's work and women's work, that was all. They had specialization, but not of the kind you are talking about. The Little House on the Prairie books fictionalize the childhoods of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder in the US in the late 19th century. They expected their readers, whose grandparents had grown up in similar conditions, to…
on “We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower” ↗"Little House on the Prairie" has a scene where the father digs a well and tests the air downhole with a candle. That's awareness of the danger in a literary work more than 100 years ago. Farmers and well-diggers have been aware…
on “I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil” ↗…the most fun to read, anyway. Ironically, the parts that the adult Weingarten find to be the best are the parts I didn't like as a kid. I always found Aunt Gertrude to be boring. The comparison with Little House on the Prairie interested me, as I read both when I was young. I probably could have identified LHotP has superior fiction, but in terms of enjoyment I most certainly did not care. Reading the Hardy Boys did not ruin…
on “The Hardy Boys - The final chapter (1998)” ↗Do you have kids in school? The curriculum is 70% studying for standardized tests and anything else they're lucky enough to get is 20 year old pretty shitty stuff. Go read little house on the prairie again. I bet its in your second or third grade class library. Go read about the "stinky natives" and how they were justified in taking land from the native's reservation. You think they have time to talk…
on “How did governments lose control of encryption?” ↗