I cannot touch my toes. I can barely sit up straight with my legs straight. I cannot lean very far over one straight and one bent leg. It has been two days since I shocked my hamstrings, and they are making their displeasure known. Stairs hurt. Putting my feet up on my usual under-desk footstool (a copy box) hurts. Ow.
RJH said last night that when he asked his students what they read for pleasure, he heard only crickets and church bells. This reminded me about how little I read actually during school. I did my school reading, but what did I read for pleasure? Slaughterhouse Five freshling year. I know a hallmate my sophomore year lent me Aura and The Awakening and that's when Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon came out too. I know I read Tolkien and Less Than Zero and The Big U. over winter break freshling year. I know I reread the favorites that I brought with me--Ayn Rand, Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, the usual. Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, of course. In grad school I read and reread for pleasure to the exclusion of my actual work. But aside from the occasional, post-midterm indulgence from the Paperback Trader's "Not for Browsing" shelf, what books did I discover on my own during school?
Donald Zochert makes me sad. I wanted detail, I wanted facts, I wanted new stuff, from Laura's notes and memoirs and from Census and land office records. That happens a bit, from when Laura was too young to remember: the name of the man who tried to make a go of the Big Woods farm, the neighbors around them in Indian territory. Instead of a factual biography, he writes a novel with such morsels as, illustrating Mary's character, the fact that she certainly wouldn't've wanted to eat the only bug in the whole of Dakota Territory. Well now that's original. So his "life" of Laura is the novels condensed, with a few details, not many--their time in Burr Oak--thrown in.
Perhaps I should accept the constraints of a book with a J preceding its Dewey designation.
Depending on his scholarship, Mary's blindness was caused by a stroke as a result of measles not wholly recovered from. The girls and their double cousins had had scarlet fever some time before, and then measles just before the stroke.
Some time ago, I read a site that alleged the Ingalls lived with a couple and their baby over the Hard Winter. Zochert says nothing about that one way or the other. He doesn't say anything about whether the Boasts' plea for Rose really happened. Were they friends afterward? I don't expect anyone to know that by any means whatever, but did they ever have a baby of their own? Did Laura and her sisters write to each other? Where are those letters, if they exist? I also read, either in Letters to Laura or on the web, that Cousin Lena recognized herself in the books and got in touch with Laura during her life: how many of her family did she correspond with? Where was Lena then? After her sisters died, did any of her many double cousins remain? How did Ma and Mary get along for 25 years after Pa died? Did Pa provide for them or did the daughters support their mother and sister? Why can't I accept her books as the wonderful stories they are instead of wanting to dissect them? Why is "dissect" spelled with two s's when the i is long?
Also the book is set in a cheesy type.