Little House in the Big Woods
Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1932
Historical fiction Young adultLiterary fictionContemporary fiction
A year of frontier childhood in a Wisconsin log cabin: fiddle music, pumpkin dinners, and a child's fierce attention to the ordinary.
Feels like nostalgia and wonder. About family and memory.
A page from the book
A child tries to keep one ordinary evening from becoming long ago.
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.She thought to herself, “This is now.”She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago. Laura Ingalls Wilder.Wilder began the Little House books in her sixties, at her daughter Rose's urging; the first was published in 1932, when she was sixty-five.
Books that feel like this
More by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little House on the Prairie
Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1935
A family crosses into the Kansas prairie with a wagon and no guarantee: pioneer life as a child saw it, thrilling, dangerous and close to the ground.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Little House in the Big Woods like?
- Feels like nostalgia and wonder. About family and memory.
- What should I read after Little House in the Big Woods?
- If you liked Little House in the Big Woods, try The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd), Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Jamie Ford) and I Know This Much Is True (Wally Lamb).
A taste of the feed
When beauty enters the body before the mind can name it.
I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
The Secret Life of Bees · Sue Monk Kidd
Some kinds of care are a controlled descent, steered as gently as possible.
But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it’s how you spend your time on the way down that counts.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet · Jamie Ford
What it took to make peace with the past and call it truth.
I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.
I Know This Much Is True · Wally Lamb
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