It's been 40 years at least since I read Little House on the Prairie,and the intervening decades were polluted with the syrupy Michael Landon TV vehicle by the same name (which my father always referred to, irreverently, as "Little Shack on the Flats"). Still, I remembered it as a good book, so when I spotted it in a bookstore recently I bought it for my nine-year-old daughter. She loves it. She's a voracious reader, but there are still times when she likes me to read to her at bedtime, and I like it too--and so it was the other night that I rediscovered what an amazing writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was.
"Then from the woods by the creek a nightingale began to sing. Everything was silent, listening to the nightingale's song. The bird sang on and on. The cool wind moved over the prairie and the song was round and clear above the grasses' whispering. The sky was like a bowl of light overturned on the flat black land."
This is crystalline prose, unfiltered and pure, beautiful in its plainness. Not a word wasted, and that image of an overturned "bowl of light"--that blows me away. On his best days, Hemmingway might have cranked out a few sentences like that (though to me his writing sounds mannered after all these years) and he is considered a 20th century literary giant. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a mere children's author. Maybe someday someone will explain to me how literary reputations are made...though at least until recent years (and probably even now) it seems that having a penis helps a lot.
Anyway, go get your kids the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. They've aged very well.