{"id":11159,"date":"2008-05-10T15:19:41","date_gmt":"2008-05-10T19:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/10\/11159.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:39","slug":"book-report-little-house-in-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/10\/book-report-little-house-in-th\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Little House in the Big Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My Perfect Non-Reader got Little House in the Big Woods<\/a> as her second dose of Americana Bedtime Story (after The Boxcar Children<\/a>), and it was interesting. I liked it a bit more than I liked The Boxcar Children<\/i>, but my Best Reader liked it a bit less.\n

Part of that may be that I have never read any of Laura Ingolls Wilder’s books, nor have I seen any movie or television show based on any of her books. My Best Reader, not being quite as pathetically culturally ignorant as YHB, watched the television series and read the books. Going back to them later, she was less charmed by the whole idea of the frontier, and more bored by the total absence of character, plot or conflict.\n

My main reaction, though, was to thank the Divine that I am not a frontiersman, nor yet a frontiersgirl. Damn, that’s a lot of work. And yes, lovely to have fiddle-playing in the evening, but honestly, I doubt Pa was really all that good at fiddle-playing, which is why the moment we all got gramophones and wireless and television and CDs and mp3 players we gave up listening to Pa scratching his fiddle. I’m joking, mostly, but in truth the charms of frontier life are pretty skimpy, and the work incredibly laborious. Is it worth the labor to have the fresh maple syrup? You know what? No. It just isn’t. But the good part is, I can still have maple syrup, and all I have to do is work in a library, get paid, and then turn over some of that money to a grocer who buys the syrup from a distributor who gets it from somebody who has machines<\/i> to do all that work.\n

At least, that’s the good part for me. Colin McEnroe called it The Big Yellow Taxi Decade<\/a>, the decade where maybe we figure out what we’ve got before it’s gone. Hapa, over at whatever the hell his thing is called these days links to a note<\/a> by Sharon Astyk talking about preparing ourselves to live without heating oil or electricity. No, thank you. I’d rather pay taxes.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger spoils the ending, you know, when we find out that they aren’t really living in 1866 but in 2037.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18364,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11159\/revisions\/18364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}