What we're reading now

Faith has finished Little House in the Big Woods and started Little House on the Prairie. For all the feel-good Americana of the series, I've more and more affected over time by the overall tragedy of the Ingalls family. Pa and the family are so happy in book 2 on the prairie -- he says it's the finest place he's ever lived -- and then it turns out that their homestead is 3 miles over the line into Indian Territory and they have to pack up and leave the home they built with their own hands and hoped to live in forevermore and all their neighbors, Mr. Edwards and the Scotts. If they'd never had to leave, Mary might not have contracted the scarlet fever that took her sight and changed her from the pretty eldest daughter into a lifelong invalid, the independent life Michael Landon's TV series foisted on her in an effort to empower the disabled aside. As light a tone as Laura uses to paint her story, the Ingalls family just never gets to stop struggling. I suppose that's what makes it nonfiction, though.

Eric is enjoying some Thomas the Tank Engine early readers. He read Thomas and the Jet Engine to Mawmaw last week, which is the first time he's read to anyone but me.

As for me, I've started making quite a bit of headway through my magazine stack. I'm caught up on my biweeklies and monthlies and am now working through my backlog of bimonthlies, dating back to December/January issues. (By the by, did you know that all the really hip magazines don't have "editors," anymore? I assumed that the Parenting chick's column was a rotating staff-member thing, as it was in the standard "editor's column" location, but her title didn't read editor. She is, though, apparently, but her official title isn't "editor in chief" but "director, print content, strategy and design." Editor-in-chief sounds way tougher. Can you see J. Jonah Jameson allowing himself to be rebranded as "director, print content, strategy and design" of the Daily Bugle?) I'm anxious to get rid of them, as I got some fun new books for my birthday, not to mention Christmas. :P I'm going to give myself permission to forget about The Pickwick Papers for now and get back to it later. It's been almost a year since I've read a real book, and I want to read something I'll enjoy, not just something I'll be glad to see the last page of.