This is my first reread of this book as an adult, and it was positively charming. I used to read this series as a child and I remember loving it, so I was interested as to how I would like it now. This book has a little of everything in it, which is what I look for in a book.

The first aspect that is highly evident in this book is how different foods are mentioned on almost every page. That isn't a problem, because I appreciated the mouthwatering descriptions, but it did leave me feeling hungry, and with an enormously strong desire to put the book down to make an apple strudel. (I made a lemon drizzle.)

I enjoyed how family stories read by Pa around a beautifully toasty fire was a regularity in every other chapter, and just the general feeling of being safe and cosy with people that care for you. It's what I came for.

Another reason why this book is so special, is because I would chew off a limb to live in a log cabin in, or on the edge of a grand forest. Just throw in my own private library and cosy chair and I'll live like I mean it.

This was a wonderfully reminiscent read, and I looked forward to continuing the series!

4 stars - Audiobook - I have dyslexia -

Laura says she is writing about “sixty years ago.” I believe she did this in the 1930s and it is about the 1870s.
Very clearly written, she details how everything was done. I had this read to me when I was six, but now I see it was a severely edited version. There’s no way I would have been interested in Pa making bullets and cleaning his gun.
The day they butcher the pig is a big deal. They have steps to deal with all the porcine body parts. Laura and Mary are given the pig’s bladder as a toy. It’s cleaned of course. Pa blows in up and ties it closed making a fun bouncy ball.
At first, of course, I was like Eew, the bladder. But then I realized, in the early 1870s, the girls would never have seen a balloon or a plastic ball.

It's been 20 years since I last read this children's classic and I was touched by its simplicity and depth. It's a story of surviving the harsh realities of wild bears, frigid winters, and distant neighbors told with splashes of joy and beauty and love.

Without being preachy, Wilder teaches the importance of hard work, respect for parents, and gratitude for life's blessings. A lovely intro to the Little House series.

This was the first chapter book I ever read and wrote a report on. I was in the third grade. My teacher was Ms. Janet Roberts. I can't recall my grade; I'm sure it was an A.

I had such a fascination with this television show as a child. As soon as I learned Laura had written books I wanted them. Of course my mother bought them. I can still picture the boxed set-checkered borders in different colors. I wish I still had those.

The most important theme I can take from this book is love. There is so much love in this family it makes my heart happy. They worked together in the gardens; they prayed together on Sunday; they prepared meals together; they sang and danced together as Pa played his fiddle. Such unity as I've rarely seen. This just doesn't happen anymore. iPhones are at the dinner table. Sports practice cuts into evenings. McDonald's drive thru becomes a meal a couple times a week. Is that evolution?

So yes and indeed, before I start my actual review of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods I should probably point out that I never actually did read the Little House on the Prairie series as a younger child (or have the novels read to me), and I therefore also do not have that sense of nostalgic love and appreciation many of my Goodreads friends tend to have with regard to both the Little House on the Prairie series as a work of historical and biographical fiction and to Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author. Because although I did watch and enjoy the television series (the one starring the late Michael Landon) every week until the last season, I in fact only started to read the actual Little House on the Prairie novels as an older adult (since by the time I started to read full length novels in English in the early 1980s, I was already a teenager and as such rather well beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author and more into writers like Judy Blume and Paula Danziger).

And while I probably would have very much adored Little House in the Big Woods had I encountered it as a child below the age eight or nine, when I finally (just a few days ago) did manage to get to perusing Little House in the Big Woods, albeit that I found the historical information and details Laura Ingalls Wilder presents regarding her early childhood in the Big Woods of Wisconsin interesting and enlightening (and indeed, I am also glad the author shows that in the 19th century, hunting and butchering animals were generally necessary in order for frontier families like the Ingalls to have sufficient food and adequate nutrition), from a personal reading pleasure point of view, I have really not all that much enjoyed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing style, finding the presented narrative of Little House in the Big Woods for the most part frustrating, annoyingly dragging and sometimes even quite tediously awkward, and indeed to such an extent, that I often became annoyingly bored with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s printed words and very much tempted to skim and to skip. For really, I truly and often just got massively frustrated with how on the surface and lacking in emotionally Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stylistics are in Little House in the Big Woods and how she regularly uses linking adverbs (as in my opinion, especially with words like “then” Laura Ingalls Wilder makes such constant use of them that I for one have indeed and certainly found Little House in the Big Woods to get totally repetitive and dragging and for this to have definitely quite negatively affected potential personal reading pleasure, and in particular for me as an older adult reader, who totally does not tend to appreciate narrative voices that feel repetitive and slow, that meander on and on and on).

I remember reading Little House on the Prairie when I was a child, but I never expanded my reading to the entire series. A reading challenge in a Goodreads group I participate in prompted me to read Little House in the Big Woods, and even though it was written for children, I still found it very enjoyable. Throughout the book Laura provides many stories from her childhood when they lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin in the mid 1800s. I've always been intrigued by what life must have been like during the era before all the modern day conveniences. In some ways, it definitely seems a lot worse - like it being a big journey just to go seven miles down the road, and in other ways it seems better - all that organic (Lol) food! I was sad to learn, however, that you have to kill a calf to make cheese.

When I think about all the changes that Laura and others living in the same time period were able to see, it absolutely boggles my mind. Laura was born in 1867 and died in 1957. She went from living the life of a pioneer to almost being able to see the first rocket launched into space - Laura died in February and Sputnik was launched in October of the same year. I wish I was old enough to have been able to talk to people who lived through these extreme changes. I'm sure it was like living in two completely different worlds.

What a lovely Classic! I would absolutely fallen in love with this book if I had read it as a child.

Second reading: 4/10/2011

I went nuts for this series beginning in 4th grade, so much so that I was convinced I'd been born in the wrong century. Given how crazy I was about these books, it's surprising I never went back to read them again before now. Thank you, Kressel, for the inspiration.

The two memories that stayed with me about this book down through all these years were the way Pa played the fiddle at night and the part where they poured the maple syrup on snow. Reading it again refreshed my memory about a lot of other parts, but there were many things I honestly had no recall of whatsoever.

I did a wonderful year-long read aloud with my kindergarten class last year, and it was a fantastic experience. They asked so many good questions, and it spawned so much good discussion, exciting writing and enthusiasm about the books. Kids talked, wrote and drew pictures about different episodes all year. I highly recommend it. I would have loved to integrate this with more study of one-room schoolhouses and our city so many years ago (maybe for 2nd grade?). Part of the reason this worked well for my kindergarten kids--in spite of their limited experience with Wisconsin and woods and wagons and farms--is that they, too, were only 5 or 6 years old. In imagining a little girl their own age facing such challenges and fears, and having such fun adventures, was a wonderful experience for them. Since I am a reader and reading specialist more than a kindergarten teacher, I used this book to begin a lot of wonderful deeper comprehension work. By the end of the book (and a year with other wonderful read-alouds), they were using vocabulary like "connection" and "prediction" when talking about what they thought about stories. It was invigorating and inspirational.

This was very cute and quiet a bit longer than expected, but a fun and nice read overall.

I never knew about this book series as a child -be it because i didn't grow up in an english speaking country or because my childhood books of this age group where mostly Astrid Lindgren books- but i can defiantly see why its is such a beloved series.

Its just nice to see a book about very simple but lovely things.

About family and love and helping each other out, no added drama or sad moments that seem completely unnecessary.

its just a cute little story that is defiantly worth a read if you enjoy softer books that don't have a lot of things happening but what is happening is fun and entertaining and most of all lovely to read about.

I can completely understand the love and adoration so many people have when talking about this series!

They say you can't go home again, but if you're rereading a beloved children's book, I think you can. I have happy memories of reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with my mother, and revisiting these wonderful stories of Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa made me feel as cozy and loved as I did when I was a girl. I'm looking forward to rereading the entire series.