#(that any first-person narrator in a book based on the author's childhood hometown is a self-insert)

[fictionadventurer]

After very little research into the other writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, my hypothesis about the Little House authorship question is that the writing is mostly Rose's, but the heart is Laura's.

In Laura's newspaper columns, the parts that sound most like Little House mostly come from the extracts she shares from Rose's letters (incidentally, it's kind of adorable how proud she is of Rose: "My daughter's in France!", "My daughter's in Albania!", etc.) The prose of Old Home Town, Rose's inspired-by-my-childhood-home novel, has some of the same concise descriptive prose that I've come to associate with the Little House style (I could hear passages in the voice of the Little House audiobook narrator).

Yet the Little House soul is all over Laura's columns. She's fascinated by the simple tasks of life, believes in home and family and hard work, believes in holding onto the goodness of childhood and looking forward with hope toward the future. There's an optimism, almost a romanticism, about life. The children's series that bears her name clearly comes from the same woman.

Rose, by contrast, is much more pessimistic. When writing about childhood, she's almost cynical about the life of a small town. She highlights the dark stories underlying the wholesome exterior, is extremely sensitive to the pitfalls of the social scene around her. Part of the difference is that Rose is writing for adults, but there does seem to be an essential difference in the personality behind the pen, despite the stylistic similarities to Little House.

(At the risk of pop psychoanalyzing people long dead, Rose seems much more neurotic and introverted and sensitive than her mother. In her writings and in the books about her childhood in Missouri, she comes across as child of a fairly comfortable modern life, with all the modern anxieties, in contrast to a woman who grew up starving on the prairie and knows that there are much worse things to endure than small-town gossip).

It's not much of a thesis, but I'm just fascinated by the fact that the Little House series can share so many stylistic similarities with Rose's writings, yet feel so much more like Laura.

[ariel-seagull-wings]

@sunlit-music

TOP 5 BOOKS (UPDATED)

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

I saw @princesssarisa commenting a lot about this novel. First, i watched the 1973 minisseries adaptation, and then readed the book in my kindle. And after that, it becamed my new n° 1 favorite book, and Jane, with her instrospection, artistic and dreamy sensibility, becamed one of my new favorite characters.

The Lord of The Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

This is one of the books i have in common with @amalthea9

The theme of continuing to dream, have hope and keep your friends united in the face of adversity was something that felt specially relevant in the year of 2020.

Romance of the Stone of the Kingdom and the Prince of Going-and-Coming Blood (Ariano Suassuna)

Romance d'A Pedra do Reino e o Príncipe do Sangue do Vai-e-Volta  (The Romance of the Stone of the Kingdom and the Prince of the Going-and-Coming Blood) is a novel writen by Ariano Suassuna, released em 1971. 

The protagonist-narrator, Dom Pedro Dinis Quaderna (or simply Dinis or Quaderna) is arrested in the village of Taperoá under acusations of subversion, and makes his own defense, relating the story of his family.

He declares himself to be a descendant of whom he calls “legitimate brazilian kings”, not related to the Bragança house, and tells his involvement in the political, philosophical and literary fights of his land. His intention in telling this story is to make the greatest novel of Brazil, and become the “Genius of the Brazilian Race”.

It is inspired by an episode that took place in the 19th century, in the desertic municipality of São José do Belmonte, 470 kilometers from Recife, where a sect, in 1836, tried to resurrect King Dom Sebastião - transformed into a legend in Portugal after disappearing in Africa (Battle of Alcácer-Quibir): under Spanish rule, the Portuguese dreamed of the return of the king who would restore the nation taken by force. The sebastianist sentiment is still remembered today in Pernambuco, during the Riding of the Stone of the Kingdom,a popular manifestation that happens annually in the place where innocents were sacrificed by the return of the king. Suassuna started the The Romance of the Stone of the Kingdom and the Prince of the Go-and-Come-Back Blood ,  in 1958, to complete it only a decade later, when the author realized what led him to write the novel : the death of his father, when he was only three years old - a personal tragedy present in Suassuna’s literature, and the redemption of his “king” - a reaction against the current concept, according to which rural forces were obscurantism ( the evil) and the urban the progress (the good). The story, based on popular northeastern culture and inspired by cordel literature, the repents and emboladas, is dedicated to the author’s father and twelve more “knights”, among them Euclides da Cunha, Antônio Conselheiro and José Lins do Rego. 

 The Mysteryous Flame of Queen Loana (Umberto Eco)

After suffering a stroke, Yambo Bodoni lost his episodic memory. Now he can't remember his name, family, or any aspects of his life. Thanks to a lifetime of work as an antiquarian book dealer in Milan, however, he can recall anything he's ever read. In order to rediscover his lost past, Yambo heads to his childhood hometown of Solara. As he pores through old newspapers, comics, and magazines, Yambo - and the reader - get glimpses into the often tragic and bittersweet reality of a boy coming of age in Italy during World War II.

One Thousand and One Nights (Several Authors)

Probably the most iconic book anthology of all time, alongside Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bocaccio's Decameron. But whereas in those two western novels the tension lies in the individual stories being told, in One Thousand and One Nights we feel the most tense for the tales's narrator, Sheherazade, who needs to guarantee that the tales will bring pleasure and entusiasm to her husband, the sultan Shariar, because storytelling is the recourse she has to save her life and the lives of all woman in the kingdom.

The Age of Fable (Thomas Bulfinch)

I was a greek-roman mithology geek as a kid, and this book by Thomas Bulfinch, that i camed into contact with in an edition that divided it into three magazines, is what i consider one of the closest to complete source for several ancient greek myths (and some norse myths). If you will recomend a book to start someone into greek-roman mithology, i sugest this one.

@parxsisburnixg