I just re-read "Farmer Boy" by Laura Ingalls Wilder for the first time in probably 5 years and it was every bit as good as I remembered it. The whole Little House on the Prairies series is amazing. I offer several reason why:
-Her characters and the world they inhabit seems very real. I was surprised to find all sorts of details that I never noticed before: little mannerisms in Almanzo's family (they always speak in unconjugated to be form, like "Be you hungry?"), the relative wealth and importance of Almanzo's family compared to the rest of the town, and many, many other details.
-She focuses the details unerringly on things that actually interested Almanzo. She puts a lot of detail into food and animals because that's what Almanzo cares about. She devotes about a page to describing church services and no more because Almanzo was bored by it.
-All her characters are very sympathetic. It's impossible to not like Almanzo or his family.
-The optimism, wisdom, and hard-working ethic of her characters:
1) They wake up at 5 a.m. and everyone in the entire household, Father, Mother, and all the children, would keep working until 6 or or 7 p.m. or even later during harvest time.
2) When a man tells Almanzo's father that Almanzo's a "smart boy" for having made a shrewd bargain on hay, his father replies "Time will show. Many a good beginning makes a bad ending. It remains to be seen how he turns out in the long run." It sounds somewhat harsh and unloving, but I think it reflects a higher standard of personal responsbility than we normally practice nowadays. It says that good character and the respect of your fellow men is something you need to earn through consistent and proven performance.
3) Especially in the life of Laura and her family, but also in Farmer Boy, you get a sense of the incredible optimism that allowed these families to make their way through the incredible challenges of frontier life. Even though Laura's family is forced to move at least 4 times in a 15 year timespan, have to suffer through near starvation, blizzards, dirt homes, and many other challenges, unfailingly the characters retain their love of life and their confidence that things will work out. They're incredible.
-Her excellent descriptions of pioneer life. She is very adept at explaining pioneer ways of living which have no analog to modern living. (such as when Almanzo and his father thresh the grain in the barn, or go cut ice on the river.)
-Finally, Laura Ingalls Wilder infuses such a love of life into her stories that you just feel happy when you read. She always focuses on the little joys of life - like snowball fights, and the exquisite joy of receiving almost nothing but an orange for Christmas (Wow - what a change in 120 years). She has a very keen sense of appreciation for animals and plant life. Laura writes about her characters in such a way that you know she loves them. I'm reminded of a quote
"To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty."
The writing of Laura Ingalls encapsulates this principle perfectly I think and it is to this that her books owe their enduring appeal. She loved pioneer life to an exceptional degree. And because of this she was best equipped to write about it in such a way as to capture its true essence.
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One final philosophical consideration completely unrelated to Farmer Boy drawn from a book I'm reading "Walking on the Tightrope of Reason":
"Imagine a board game as complicated and challenging as chess. It has been played for centuries; tournaments are held, world champions are crowned, books and magazines are published concerning it. The ability to excel at this game is taken as a mark of high intelligence. We will call this game Ludwig. One day two novices playing foolishly (though making legal moves) stumble into a position where two of the rules of the game come into conflict. The conflict arises in the following way. Ludwig, like other games, has rules of various kinds. It has rules specifying the ways that pieces are permitted to move. It also has rules indicating that, under certain circumstances, a move is mandatory - as in checkers you have to ump a piece if you are able to jump a piece. It also has rules that, under certain circumstances, forbid making moves that are otherwise legal - as in chess one is not allowed to expose one's king to check. Our novices somehow work their way into a position where a particular move is both mandated and forbidden, thus leaving no legal way to proceed. The game gets "hung up," as computer programs sometimes do. Because this possibility exists, we can say that Ludwig is inconsistent in the following sense: A series of legal moves can lead to a situation where a further move is both mandated and forbidden. We might say that the system of rules governing Ludwig is, in this sense, dilemma-prone. Finally, we can suppose that this feature of the rules - its dilemma proneness - has gone undetected for centuries because the moves that lead to it, though legal, are wholly unmotivated. Nobody who understands the point of the game Ludwig would make the movies leading to this situation...
Given that Ludwig us dilemma-prone, what are we to say about its status as a game? ... This, then, is the first thesis I wish to maintain: the presence of an inconsistency in the rules that govern a game need not destroy the game; indeed avoiding inconsistency could make the game unplayable or uninteresting. In some circumstances, we can live, and live happily, in the neighborhood of inconsistency. I will say that a game and, by extension, any system of rules is "Ludwigean" if, like Ludwig, it is dilemma-prone yet perfectly playable when movies are made in a serious, purposive manner."
SO that's the extract. I hope you like it as much as I did when I read it. You can really apply this principle to pretty much anything in life. Just because something isn't perfectly logical doesn't mean that it's useless or "wrong." Sometimes our best option is just to live with inconsistency and ambiguity.
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