In Which I Submit To the Dungeon Crawler Carl Universe, Such That I Am Now A Donut Hole

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Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

LITERALLY WHY AM I CRYING?!? This series is about a dude who runs around in boxers and a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend’s cat on his shoulder! WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS?!?

I think I could have held the line against Feelings if I’d stopped at Book 1. Dungeon Crawler Carl was mostly simply fun--in a really fucked up way, I mean. Y’all, that Hoarder Neighborhood Boss thought she’d died and gone to hell because she was a bad person! I was, as they say, appalled.

Interestingly, that scene is set up to reward the reader who isn’t simply rushing through the text to get to the next explosion… as long as they’re not already literate in Spanish, I guess. I can read Spanish if it’s easy, but my older kid can’t, and when we were talking about the book she hadn’t thought that scene was especially affecting, but THEN she admitted that she hadn’t bothered to translate the Spanish, either. When I told her what the Hoarder had been saying, she was all, “Yeah, omg that’s fucked up.”

I also think it’s interesting that the two most messed up scenes in the entire series, that Hoarder one and the goblin baby one, are both in Book 1. At the end of Book 1, and then much more heavy-handedly throughout the rest of the series, we start getting kicked in the teeth by the concept that the NPCs are beings, too, with their own thoughts and feelings and interior worlds, etc., so the idea of horrific violence against them no longer works to elicit even horrified laughter.

I think it takes about that same amount of time for us to realize that Carl isn’t just an action-adventure meathead, and that even though Donut still has her psychotic cat-like tendencies, she’s going to grow emotionally. 

Although--several characters throughout the book call her a child, or child-like, but I don’t feel like that’s an accurate description for how she is, or especially for the relationship between her and Carl. She’s very much exactly as a cat would be if they were suddenly actually a person in a fur suit, and I think that is a major part of why I love this book so much. At its core, Dungeon Crawler Carl is genuinely just a book about a guy who really, really, really loves his cat. And if you, too, have powerfully, aggressively, wholeheartedly loved an animal companion, I feel like you’re going to recognize that and you’re going to get why that’s important. Like, my cat, Spots, is not my baby. She gets on my nerves. She’s spoiled and completely unreasonable. I would also murder an actual human in cold blood to protect her and I doubt I’d even feel bad about it afterwards.

This isn’t my first series in the LitRPG genre, although it’s close--I’ve read the Ready, Player One series, but that’s about it--and I’m definitely not as into the passages about stats and loot boxes and character classes as I could be, although I’ve played my share of DnD so I understand it. And the books where the premise switched to Pokemon or Mario Kart were not as fun as the dungeon fantasy ones. Is the trains premise meant to mimic an RPG genre? Surely not Ticket to Ride, right? Although now that we’re talking about it, a Settlers of Catan book would be SICK!

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is where the stakes got a lot less like simple fucked-up fun and more like we are torturing these people in such a heartbreaking manner, because it turns out that my meathead Coastie is actually a really good guy who’s had his goodness taken advantage of for too long, and the stuck-up cat brat is actually the pet mom that she herself should have had, and she knows it. Like, genuinely how does the exact same book have me exclaiming both “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GENOCIDE AN ENTIRE PLANET!” and “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GIVE AWAY YOUR PET!” I mean, both of those sentiments are obvious, it’s just funny that they’re both themes in the same book.

And the sentiment of beating your head against the wall of whatever unfair limit is and always will inevitably be thwarting you, with no hope that it will get better, but still you beat your head against that wall and proclaim that the wall will not break you, you will break that wall--that’s always the human condition, I guess, but it feels especially like the human condition these days.

Walking the tightrope of portraying that the AI/Dungeon has taken the most stereotypical (and therefore demeaning/dehumanizing) elements of human pop culture for the dungeon while also portraying that the creatures embodying these stereotypes are actually whole beings worthy of compassion (and not, you know, of having all their babies bombed to death) got a little wobbly here--I just don’t know if there was a way of depicting the murders of goblin sex workers that would have successfully walked that tightrope--but I think I got what Dinniman was going for. None of the portrayals were as abject as Book 1’s Hoarder Boss or those goblin babies, but I’m still pouring one out for good old GumGum tonight.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook is the book where it’s probably the easiest to get lost, because not only is there a complicated train system that Dinniman explicitly says you’re not supposed to try to figure out but it’s definitely super weird that you can’t figure it out, but also I’m personally less interested in crafting tables, chats, gems, and just all magical items in general. I did surprisingly enjoy some of the train mob battles, though--very Train to Busan-ish! I got VERY invested in the Katia/Hekla storyline, though--Iceland is so messy!

Also, how many other crawlers do we feel like have been invited to become part of a secret society and just can’t tell anyone?

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Gate of the Feral Gods makes the switch from Monster of the Week to Big Bad format, which is a little bit of a bummer for me, because if given the choice I will ALWAYS vote for Monster of the Week, and yet my series are ALWAYS trying to Big Bad me! Sam and Dean, I really did want you to just keep fighting wendigos and vampires and ghosts for 16 seasons!

Also, I know I excused the prostitution storyline from Book 2, because I get that the AI/Dungeon Planners are taking the worst/most stereotypical versions of human pop culture as their premise, but Dinniman. Must we have ANOTHER sex worker storyline?!? Two sex worker storylines is too many sex worker storylines. Make Juicebox a regular waitress and stop being weird.

Oh, wait. If you count Samantha that’s three sex worker storylines. Dinniman, you’re starting to reveal too much about your psyche. Like, this is becoming My Dad Wrote a Porno levels of unconscious revelation.

I do appreciate, though, that at least we’re not getting any sex/romance storylines with Carl, thank goodness. Let me enjoy his competence and developing character arc in peace, please! Plus the emotional growth of his platonic life partner, Donut. I’m worried that at some point they ARE going to break him, but until then my favorite thing is watching him craft a complicated plan to save everyone, and then throw bombs at it until it works.

I also remain very worried about Donut’s Constitution.

The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Butcher’s Masquerade leans very hard into the discomfort of existing in a universe that is built upon the oppressed as status quo, with bullying evident all the way from top to bottom. This universe is built upon the goal of no matter how low you go, you should always have a dog to kick. And we’re starting to see how some of those dogs are and have been fighting back, and how it’s starting to maybe pay off.

Also, even a Dungeon Crawler universe has lawyers!

Also also... poor Prepotente.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I know for sure that I'm a basic bitch, because Prepotente shrieking out of nowhere will never not be absolutely hilarious to me.

I never played Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, so the premise of this book is a little bit lost on me. But I still haven't figured out what the train game from Book 3 was supposed to be, either--Ticket to Ride? Chutes and Ladders?--so it's fine. My mind definitely skimmed over all the card game rules talk, though, so I'm glad that Donut was paying attention!

It feels really unfair that not only are the aliens trying to kill Carl, but they're also trying to existentially torture him, as well. But at least they've got the excuse of being villains--what on EARTH was up with Bea?!? WHY IS SHE SO CARTOONISHLY EVIL?!? Genuine question: is she a sociopath? She has to be a sociopath. Seriously. Who DOES this?!?

It's interesting, though, that everything revealed about Bea paints Carl as a guy with a good heart who was just floating through life. If he'd ever paid attention to or emotionally invested himself in Bea, there's no way that he wouldn't have noticed all that she was up to. And not to victim blame, but I can't help but feel a little sorry for Bea. Her machinations were absurdly easy to suss out by someone who paid the least bit of attention to her--I mean, the CAT sussed them out!--so how little attention could Carl have been tossing in the direction of his very own live-in girlfriend to not have clocked a single bit of it.

How she didn't try babytrapping him is beyond me!

But anyway, in Book 1, Carl was a video game character. The writing was fine, but he, as a person, didn't have a ton of depth. It's wild that even though this scenario is terrible, this is the most alive he's been since he was a little dude holding his mom's hand and looking out at the Grand Canyon. This is the most love he's given and received. The most family he's had. He's got a devoted platonic life partner who shares his goals and is a true peer and companion. He's got a purpose now. He's passionate. What he's doing is important.

Deep down inside, do we think Carl might be kinda happy here in the dungeon?

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our anti-capitalist anti-heroes really come into their own on this level. I kind of wish that the Carl of Level 9 could go back in time so I could see how he'd handle Level 1's Hoarder, or Level 2's GumGum, with his newfound understanding of how this universe works. And I think it would be even sadder, because I don't think he *could* have handled them differently!

Is there meaning in suffering, even when the suffering itself is pointless? It's certainly helped Carl gain a lot of leadership skills, I guess! Seriously, though, I feel like this book does have a lot to say about what it means to suffer, to be a victim. Whether you're a goblin baby or a dungeon crawler or are caught up in Donut's Giant Ball spell or are one of 120,000 children trapped inside Lucia's mind or your cartoon villain girlfriend is monstrously manipulating you and you don't even know it, your experience has meaning, and the meaning of that suffering travels beyond just you.

I also love the through-line of those who strive to help the vulnerable. And not just the already desperate, like those on the surface repeatedly attacking the kinder center, but also Katia, who just wants to comfort a terminally ill baby for the time she has left, and Mordecai, who's one of the few game guides genuinely doing his best. Same for Carl's lawyer. It keeps the vast number of those who are thrilled to victimize the vulnerable from feeling too oppressive.

All that being said, though, I genuinely had no idea what was going on in most of the book. And it was fine. I should have just tossed a bunch of bombs at the plot and I could have been like Carl!

A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sooo... we're doing Mario Kart, I guess.

Also, boo, Capitalism!

The only other thing I have to say is that Carl REALLY should have gotten rid of that one specific pet biscuit...

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George Washington Carver Was So Awesome WHY WAS EVERYONE SO MEAN TO HIM?!?!?!?!

George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ME, worriedly, every so often: "Please don't tell anyone how much I hate Booker T. Washington so they don't think I'm racist."

ALL FAMILY MEMBERS: "Okay, but you're the most likely person to tell someone that."

And fine, it's true, so here we go:

I hate Booker T. Washington. I think he did a really terrible job running the Tuskegee Institute (he did a really great job founding it--he just did a really terrible job running it!), I think a lot of what he said and did was wrongheaded, I think he should have been open to other leaders' ideas of how best to lift up their people instead of just stubbornly following his own personal brand of black-and-white thinking, I think he got distracted by showmanship too often.

But most of all, I hate him because he was really, really, REALLY mean to George Washington Carver for literally no reason. Washington acted like his whole purpose in life was to serve his people, and then turned around and stole away probably the greatest genius of that time and hid him away and made him work like a dog without any of the resources he could have so easily provided and then when Carver created miracles anyway, Washington acted like those miracles were garbage and just continued trying to stomp Carver down.

And for some reason beyond all comprehension, or really just because that's the kind of guy he was, George Washington Carver LOVED Booker T. Washington, loved him and admired him and had so much affection for him, and in return, Washington's every action toward Carver (after, of course, he'd gone to all the trouble to woo Carver into taking that job at Tuskegee) was filled with just palpable contempt. In George Washington Carver: A Life, author Christina Vella writes that every Christmas, Carver made these beautiful hand-painted Christmas cards for all his favorite people. They were masterpieces. Washington always got one, and barely even acknowledged them. But the next year, Carver would go right ahead and paint him another beautiful masterpiece, and Washington would again be all like, "Meh." But after Washington died (yay!) and another guy took over as head of Tuskegee, Carver went to all the trouble to make that guy his very own hand-painted Christmas card, too, because he was just that nice.

And that guy was so touched that he wrote Carver a genuine multi-paged THANK-YOU NOTE FOR THE CHRISTMAS CARD. THAT'S HOW MUCH HE LOVED IT.

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Ugh, Booker T. Washington!

Honestly next I should probably read a proper biography of Booker T. Washington, because right now he exists solely in my mind as a cartoon villain.

He really was VERY mean to Carver, though.

Which I feel like is a pattern that started when Carver was a newborn! Susan and Moses Carver, the people who raised him from the time of his mother’s abduction (at least the official story is an abduction--I’d tell you what I think happened, but I feel like I have already expressed an unhealthy amount of George Washington Carver-centric conspiracy theories in my life and I think I'm already not getting invited to parties about it) to the age of nine or ten, allowed that nine- or ten-year-old to leave home and figure out his own means of sustenance and support when little George, with a knack for learning, decided that an education was what he really, really, really wanted for himself. Vella writes somewhat bemusedly that George didn’t seem to remember much of his childhood and/or would often simply tell some amusing anecdote that he’d contradict in a later interview. She attributes it to absent-mindedness, in that his focus was always elsewhere, but honestly I don’t buy it. As an adult, this dude seemed VERY focused on interpersonal relationships. He treasured his friends, and was kind to fans and acquaintances. I feel like if he couldn’t remember his childhood enough to even give a consistent count for the number of siblings he had, there was a reason for it. And if it wasn’t a memory issue but instead that he didn’t want to talk about his childhood and fiction was easier, well, there was a reason for that, too.

Thank goodness little unhoused Carver met people along the way who did help and nurture and support him, although he clearly witnessed and experienced a lot of trauma, too. And he made his own way. He cleaned houses, he took in laundry, and Vella tells a story in which as a child he talked his way into a job as a personal chef and to cover the fact that he didn’t know how to cook he got the lady of the house to demonstrate how to make every single dish so that he could, as he told her, “make it the way you like it.” And after that, he did!

After making his own way in the world, traveling to wherever there was a school he could learn in, pausing his enrollment periodically as he ran out of money, he finally got enough education to be accepted to Highland College in Kansas. He used the rest of his money to get himself there, but when he showed up, the head of the college was all like, “Oh. Yeah, we don’t actually admit Negros,” and Carver had to simply walk away, broke and with his dreams dashed AGAIN.

I hate you, too, Highland College.

Carver was, if anything, even more poor when he was finally able to attend Simpson College, an art school, and then after that, thanks to a teacher who took him under her wing, Iowa State College. But I feel like Iowa State was where he was the happiest in his entire life. He still cleaned and took in laundry, but Vella notes that his teachers and schoolmates and neighbors would make sure he at least had tons of work, because that’s the only way they could get him to take their money. In 1893, four of his paintings won entry into the Chicago World’s Fair, and Carver was going to get to go see them there. But all his clothes were garbage. So one day, some of his classmates literally kidnapped him off the street, manhandled him into a department store, forced him to try on clothes, and then bought him a beautiful new suit, completely against his will.

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And you guys. I cry every time I tell this story, because it is literally so sweet and SO insane, because Carver basically NEVER TOOK THAT SUIT OFF AGAIN IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I mean, like, I’m sure he had pajamas, and he spent a lot of time in a lab coat, but if he was dressed up and out and about, he was wearing that suit. That twenty-year-old suit. That thirty-year-old suit. That FORTY-YEAR-OLD SUIT. It was always clean--Carver, after all, was a laundry man!--and it always had a fresh flower in its lapel, but people started to not be able to tell what color it was supposed to be. It was probably, like, dry rotting or something at some point. And sometimes, someone would be like, “Buddy, you want to get yourself a new suit or something?” And Carver, even after he finally had some money--although he never had money like he was supposed to, because Tuskegee never paid him a decent salary, much less the salary he deserved--would just be like, “But clearly I already have a suit I am literally wearing it right now?”

So here’s the thing: Vella makes very clear that Carver was super happy at Iowa State. Some people were for sure racist towards him but a lot of people were not, he had friends, he had mentors, he was learning and he loved it, he was blowing everyone away with how smart he was and how nice and how good he was at everything, and he already had an excellent job lined up right there as soon as he graduated, because these professors did NOT want to let him out of their sight, he was so awesome.

Enter Booker T. Washington.

And okay, to be fair to Washington, the people of Alabama, Black and white but especially Black, were just absolutely beyond destitute at this time. Anything that anyone could do to help them was a very good thing. But Washington had a very black and white, VERY limited idea of what was best for Black people as a whole, and he didn’t give a fuck that it wasn’t what many Black people wanted for themselves--he was going to do for them what HE wanted to do for them, and that’s it.

And what he wanted to do for them wasn’t so much to offer a proper school education, although to be fair Tuskegee did teach literacy and numeracy, but essentially to offer more sophisticated farming and industrial education. I think it was this weird wanting to serve his people but also hating intellectualism vibe that Vella describes that made him 1) work as hard as he did to woo Carver away from his perfect Iowa State prospects, but also 2) shit on everything Carver tried to do and act contemptuous of all his accomplishments and thwart all his efforts because Carver was clearly very intellectually gifted and treasured intellect, and that shone through as much as his kindness did.

So Washington refused to fund Carver’s teaching lab, causing Carver to resort to garbage picking and DIY to stock it. Carver scored a very prestigious federal grant to host an experiment station at the school, and Washington refused to assign him a consistent staff to work it. When Carver succeeded with the station anyway and published useful educational brochures, Washington refused to have them printed. It got so bad that when Washington learned that Carver had been teaching--for free! in his free time!--an extremely popular Bible study class for the past three years, he immediately shut it down. Tell me one reason why he’d do that that’s not from simple spite!

Tuskegee could have furnished his lab if they'd wanted to.

Also, I’m very open to the possibility that the author is biased against Booker T. Washington and has simply passed it onto me. Like I said, I need to read a proper bio about him!

But you know what? Carver took Washington’s contempt and Tuskegee’s garbage and with them, he performed wonders. He genuinely saved Alabama, and the South as a whole, with his research and outreach. Enslavers had used their access to free labor to monoculture cotton to such an extent that the land was completely devoid of nutrients, and so everyone who was still trying to live off the land had resorted to simply growing more and more of that same monoculture just to chase any kind of profit. People were malnourished because they’d converted their kitchen gardens to cotton. Same with their livestock yards. Part of Carver’s extensive research and outreach was finding nutritious, cheap crops and livestock that fed people, turned a profit, and also healed the land. Sweet potatoes. Hogs. PEANUTS!!! People were also longing for more elevated lifestyles but weren’t sure what that would consist of, so were spending their precious money on stupid stuff like fancy clocks and organs that represented culture to them (tangent, but I thought this detail was VERY interesting, because way north in De Smet, South Dakota, the Ingalls family was also spending their precious money on a stupid organ!). So Carver researched methods of making beautiful paints cheaply from the local soils, then taught everyone how to paint their homes and furnishings so they could have pretty things around them without wasting their money.

Another tangent: all throughout the book, Vella just keeps on referring to Carver’s “woman’s voice.” She genuinely goes out of her way to bring this up ALL THE TIME. Carver meets someone famous--they must be surprised to hear his woman’s voice! Carver gives a lecture--people probably thought it was strange hearing a woman’s voice! At one point, I swear she is absolutely giddy because Carver met a woman whom she says had an unusually deep voice, and she’s genuinely all, “OMG I BET IT SOUNDED SO WEIRD! BECAUSE HE SOUNDED LIKE A WOMAN AND SHE SOUNDED LIKE A MAN! AND WHEN THEY TALKED TO EACH OTHER IT WAS LIKE THE OTHER PERSON’S VOICE SHOULD BE COMING OUT OF EACH OF THEIR MOUTHS! HAHAHAHAHA!!!”

So anyway, I kept reading her taking these shots at Carver’s voice and being all, “Dude! Why is she obsessed with saying he sounds like a woman?” So I got on YouTube to see if there are any videos of Carver speaking.

There are. And fine, he sounds like a woman. Just… Vella acts weirdly excited about it, okay?

Anyway, *I* was very excited in the book when Booker T. Washington died, even though it caused Carver to go into genuine mourning for months and also donate half a year’s worth of his pitiful salary to a memorial for that asshole. I’m just so mad at how much of his life he gave up for that man.

There’s another whole weird part of the biography concerning how Carver apparently also gave up another huge chunk of his life to massaging people with peanut oil, because it got published in the newspapers as a miracle cure, causing people to show up from everywhere all the time asking him to, and he was too nice to say no. It’s super weird, though.

Another weird part: although everyone online seems to think that Carver was queer because he was life partners with the lab assistant he had late in his career, Austin W. Curtis, Jr., Vella does not think that this was true at all. Honestly, she low-key makes Curtis out to be a villain who made secret deals behind Carver’s back to profit off of their professional partnership and their friendship. Instead, she puts forth the VERY convincing case that Carver was queer because he was deeply in love with a much younger man whom he met through church stuff. He wrote him obsessive letters for years, letters in which you can literally feel the agonized longing, translated into Jesus-speak. This besottedness went mostly unreciprocated, poor dude. Honestly, I think Carver was probably aroace. His letters of religious fervor to that dude did sound pretty sexy, but I dunno, religion can be weird like that.

Eventually, Henry Ford befriended Carver and built him the fanciest of fancy labs. But you guys, you might as well go ahead and start crying with me again, because by then, Carver was too frail to get much use out of it. He just always worked so hard, and I feel like he never got exactly what he deserved out of life. I guess he’d be proud of his beautiful George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee, although I’m low-key mad about it, but his other memorial is literally at his enslavers’ house sooo…

So… I dunno, you guys. All I know about George Washington Carver I learned from his national park site and this biography and some really sketchy online content that I do not believe. People are such weirdos. So, did Vella do me dirty? Is Booker T. Washington actually awesome and now I hate him for no reason? Was Curtis really Carver’s lover and Vella simply won’t say?

Is it super weird that she kept saying he had a woman’s voice? I mean sure, it’s high-pitched--okay, it’s remarkably high-pitched--but she’s being weird about it, right?

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I Hate Pa Ingalls the Most, but Laura Might Hate Ma

Schoolhouse from the time that we visited the Ingalls' homestead in De Smet, South Dakota.

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Because if she doesn’t, then why is she always painting her as such a bigot? We all know by now that Ma hates the native peoples from whom the government stole the land they’re living on, so we’re not surprised by this iteration on that theme:

“What Indian?” Ma asked him. She looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian whenever she said the word. Ma despised Indians. She was afraid of them, too.

We know that Laura does not share this particular bigotry, or at least not to the extent that Ma does, both because she sometimes portrays native peoples positively in her books, but also because she portrays Pa as explicitly NOT bigoted against them. Pa is her ideal, and I can’t think of a single instance in the entire series in which he’s portrayed in a way that Laura would think was negative.

Ma, however… Ma is also bigoted against immigrants!

She did not like to see women working in the fields. Only foreigners did that. Ma and her girls were Americans, above doing men’s work.

But then, of course, Ma “lets” Laura help Pa with haying regardless, as long as nobody sees them, because Laura is the most parentified child in all the land.

This latest re-read of The Long Winter, just after finishing the non-fiction book The Children’s Blizzard that discusses the climate in the Dakota Territory and how unsuited it is to the settlers’ farming techniques and lifestyles and how especially dangerous it is in the winter, was startling. I had not remembered exactly HOW dark this book is, how bleak, how close to dying this family genuinely must have come, how these several months of starvation must have harmed them, physically and emotionally, for the rest of their lives. Grace was a toddler who spent seven months living in two rooms, being constantly too cold, and eating mostly wheat and a little fat. Carrie was only ten. Laura was only thirteen. Laura doesn’t mention rickets or scurvy or other signs of malnutrition, but I think historical record tells the tale well enough, in that all three younger sisters died of diabetes, while Mary died of a stroke.

Ever since I read Prairie Fires and have started learning all I can about the VERY contentious relationship between Laura and Rose, and the subtext of Laura’s relationship with Almanzo, I’ve been very interested in how Laura depicts her family in her books. She wrote these books in conversation with Rose, so I’m curious if any of these depictions might have anything to say about their relationship. She wrote them as fiction, but sometimes only lightly fictionalized, so I’m also curious about what she might have tried to tell more truthfully and what she might have fictionalized harder. And because she had SUCH a difficult relationship with Rose, and because Rose so clearly did not like Laura, I’m very curious about how Laura depicts Ma, in particular. I think she mostly wants to treat her as a perfect parent, but she does show her with flaws.

Other than the bigotry, Laura also depicts Ma’s impatience a couple of times, along with her own. Mary is never depicted as impatient or rude, but Laura cleverly manages to write all of Mary’s dialogue as the smuggest, most mealy-mouthed, annoyingly know-it-all declarations so that you want to just step in and slap her face for Laura. Carrie is depicted in not an idealized light like Pa, but rather a sympathetic light that reads as even more loving than Laura’s constant Pa praising, and Grace simply exists. I don’t think Grace and Laura ever interact in this book!

I also think it’s very interesting how Laura depicts herself. She’s very dutiful, always ready to chip in and do more than her fair share of labor, ever the hardest worker in the family, but I don’t feel her taking a lot of pleasure in anything. Which is fair, since this IS The Long Winter. But other books, particularly the ones that I think are more influenced by Rose’s Libertarianism, are SO overtly about this self-reliance and the enjoyment of pleasures in the midst of hardship and the early 1900s political ideals that privilege the state of rugged individualism that it’s also a little surprising that Laura didn’t try to insert a few happier scenes. It’s possible that she was literally just that traumatized by her memories of that winter that she literally couldn’t. Or she used the Wilder brothers as her avatars of happy rugged individualism, instead.

But she did achieve her main goal, which was to never admit to anyone that Pa was a fool who dragged them out into the middle of nowhere, with only one single rail line between them and death. I bet that little house in the big woods that he made them leave behind was soooo cozy and comfortable that winter!

Unrelated to the rest of my review, but the scene in The Long Winter in which a blizzard strikes while the children are in school, and the children and schoolteacher try to walk back to town and barely avoid accidentally wandering off into the prairie to die instead, reads so much like the real events of the Children's Blizzard that I started that book thinking it was also describing this winter. But it's not! Buuuuut that Children's Blizzard was so widely written about in newspapers that I wonder VERY much if it informed Wilder's account here.  

Also unrelated, but you know the happy sunflower song that Pa sings every freezing winter morning? This is it!

And here's Captain Jinks!

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Do I Hate Pa Ingalls Or Railroad Tycoons More?

The closest thing I could find in my photo albums to a blizzard-stricken Dakota Territory is an exceptionally snowy day at Fort Necessity.

The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The answer is Pa Ingalls, of COURSE. But I also hate railroad tycoons!

One of the things that I like most about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels is that she explicitly places them in a specific geographic and historical context that she very much wants to be relatable. She tells her audience that she is writing books about what it was like when their grandparents were children. But Wilder writes these fictional stories about the fictional childhood of a fictional grandparent as someone with no living grandchildren to tell her own real-life stories to. Other than the first-draft memoir Pioneer Girl, we don’t really know what her real-life version of her childhood would have been and how it would have differed from the fictional Little House. We know only a handful of the many stories that Pa, also a storyteller, must have passed down to her and her siblings. But based on what we do know about Wilder, her memoir and interviews, the historical records, and how much trouble librarians have always had figuring out how to shelve the books, we know that her stories are often (mostly?) true to life, sometimes only lightly fictionalized, and sometimes simply more inclined to be an idealized version of her overall tumultuous childhood. We can’t take her words as gospel, obviously--and nor do we, or at least me and my fellow Pa Haters don’t, because it’s clear as day how much Wilder wants us to love Pa. But dang, would it be easier to categorize Wilder’s work if she’d had a better understanding of authorship and journalistic integrity… or maybe not, since her style of outsider art heavily edited by a narcissist daughter with a political agenda and an equally loose concept of authorship is maybe what makes these books so special.

Anyway, all that is simply to say that I read The Children’s Blizzard specifically to directly inform my understanding of Wilder’s The Long Winter, so much so that I also re-read The Long Winter, which will be a tale for another day, but wow. SO much bleaker than I remembered!

And as far as directly informing The Long Winter, it both did? And also didn’t?

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The part that was most informative regarding The Long Winter, and the decision-making therein (which again, is explicitly fiction, but could be anywhere from lightly fictionalized to completely invented), was the looming, but rarely actualized, presence of That. Fucking. Train! Reading this book, I’m almost glad that our rail system mostly went the way of the dodo, because those train magnates deserved nothing but bad things! Bad people! Bad! Bad and booo!

Genuinely, though, I actually am really sad about the state of our rail system. I don’t want the train companies to snooker me into moving into a death zone, but I DO want to be able to take the train to Indianapolis and Louisville and Cincinnati and St. Louis, which I could have done 100 years ago! Just give me the 1920 version of train travel without the 1920 version of impending economic downfall!

ANYWAY. The idea behind The Children’s Blizzard is that the train companies lied, cheated, stole, and did whatever else they could get away with (which was basically everything) to get people to move--via train, in many cases!--out to these lands stolen from the indigenous peoples, then when the settlers got there in many cases the train company sold them land they themselves had gotten free from the government, and when the settlers needed supplies, well, guess what? All those supplies came out by TRAIN!

Again, more on that when I write specifically about The Long Winter, but still. Don’t forget that we HATE those train assholes!

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It would still be unethical business practices if, when people got to those territories, they discovered that everything was exactly as it had been depicted to them. Even if you really could simply tickle the ground and wheat would grow, the train monopoly would be too powerful to be trustworthy. But the train monopoly was too powerful AND they were a bunch of liars, because the climate in those territories was not suited for what they'd advertised, so not only could people not making a living as promised, but they couldn't even come prepared for what they'd be facing.

Specifically, those winters. They were bad, they were long, and settlers were completely unprepared to survive them. Neither sod houses nor claim shanties had proper insulation, and people were often unable to stock enough food and fuel to see them through to Spring, much less stock enough to keep their animals alive. This Children's Blizzard was unusual only in its suddenness and its timing, which struck most places during the school day, when kids who lived miles from the school house had come to school that day in light clothes appropriate for the warm spell they'd enjoyed that morning. But the cold killed settlers all winter, every winter.

The petty politics of weather forecasters was a necessary but dry part of the book, and you can genuinely skip those sections and still know what’s going on. Guys didn’t always do their jobs correctly, sometimes people were drunk, and telegrams cost money that the government didn’t always want to pay, all of which led to the news about the cold front not getting spread like it should, but I dunno how much of an impact a correct forecast really would have had here. It’s not like kids were checking the morning weather forecast before leaving for school!

What did not inform my re-read of The Long Winter is that this blizzard actually was not the one depicted in The Long Winter. I was sure it was, because Wilder describes a blizzard early in the book that matches the description of the Children’s Blizzard VERY well. But it’s not, oops! It does make me wonder if Wilder drew on newspaper descriptions of that blizzard for her scene, though. But the book was still worth reading, because it did inform my overall understanding of The Long Winter, the migration to Dakota Territory, and the impact of that FUCKING train, ugh!

If you’re into disaster non-fiction (and if you are, then my response to you is “!!!?!!!”), this book pairs well with David McCullough’s book on the Johnstown Flood. They occurred in adjacent years, the painful level of detail about the individual experience of each disaster is similar, and the aftermath is also interestingly similar in terms of the media response. The media loves a darling!

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I Read the Canon Work on Ley Lines, and Then I Read Some Ley Lines Fanfic

This is my tourist map of the ancient sites of Great Britain. Watkins used maps about 10 times this size for his ley line hunting.

Early British Trackways: Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites by Alfred Watkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The other night, I looked up from the book I was reading (this one, lol!) and said to my older daughter, “So, okay. You know the guy who invented ley lines?”

And she had the nerve to be all, “Oh, yes, indeed! The perennial subject of half our conversations? That guy who is a Totally Normal Guy For You To Always Be Talking About? Please, do tell me what that guy who obviously everybody knows and discusses regularly said this time!”

Well, humph. At that point I didn’t even want to tell her, except obviously yes of course I did, because this guy was creating his ley lines by hand with a straight edge and pins on taped-together ordnance maps with a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. England is something like 280 miles wide, y’all! That is WILD WORK!

This screenshot of an ordnance map showing just south of Avebury is about the right size. Even at this scale, though, you can't see the sacred wells or "named trees" that Watkins continually references as waypoints. At this scale, I'd sort of assumed you could see the individual stones of West Kennett Avenue and Avebury, and you also can't see the cross markers that Watkins also continually references. He would have LOVED Google Earth!

There are two things that I find the most interesting about ley lines. The first is that they’re not real. Or rather, it’s more like they’re real, but only in the sense that Great Britain is so chock-full of ancient sites and mounds and wells and earthworks and ponds and tumps and trees and river fords that surely every single one of them must be in line with several others, ESPECIALLY if you dial down to a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. Like, I genuinely do not think you could walk a single mile through the British countryside without bumping into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond! And okay, that’s not *exactly* what he meant--what he wanted to do was find lines that represented purposeful walking tracks, like from a flint quarry to a settlement, say, with markers that you could pick out by sight to guide you back and forth--but still. So many ponds. So many tumps.

That being said, however, I genuinely don’t find the bones of this idea unreasonable, and I think that it makes overt the important concept that people of other times didn’t necessarily perceive or think in the ways that we perceive or think. Their methods of wayfinding don’t have to be ours, and there’s nothing wrong with being creative in our hypotheses about how those methods might have worked. Like, sure, if you’re taking a two-day hike to the flint quarry, you absolutely have some sort of visual markers to guide your way. When it comes to placing Stonehenge and a couple of sacred wells and a really cool tree on that same path… I dunno about that, but maybe sometimes! It would certainly say a lot of interesting things about those ancient peoples at a societal level if it were true!

The other thing that I find the most interesting about ley lines is how they were co-opted by the mystical-minded. Watkins didn’t think they were lines of energy, or magnetic forces. He didn’t think they were mystical. He wasn’t standing on the sidewalk at Glastonbury offering to do tarot card readings. He would be SO sad to learn that his precious ley lines that he invented were now an iconic determinant of an individual’s woo-ness. But honestly, I’m kind of into it! It’s like people have been writing fanfic about ley lines, and I LOVE fanfic! I somehow found out about a small zine, The Ley Hunter, that was indie published in the 1960s and 1970s, allll about the woo version of ley lines and similar mystical topics, and then I found a good samaritan who had scanned a bunch of them into pdfs, and now I am nose deep into Ley Hunter lore. Currently, I’m living in 1965, learning about how the lost civilization of Atlantis was located off the coast of Ireland, and reading an article about how following the path of a ley line out from Bramber Castle makes for a lovely weekend stroll. If I lived in England, I would have so many interesting ways to fill my weekends!

The article actually said that it was the tree-topped mound right next to Bramber Castle that was the actual ley line sighting point, which agrees with Watkins' assertion that many castles and other notable buildings and settlements were placed next to, not on, ley lines. 

I did think it was interesting that in The Ley Hunter vol. 1, issue 4, author Jimmy Goddard writes about buying a 1 inch to 1 mile ordnance survey map of the Isle of Man, with the plan to map and then walk all of the ley lines he could find, creating the world’s first actual comprehensive survey of ley lines in one distinct area. Because the Isle of Man is small, he writes that he thought this would take a few weeks. But then he writes:

“How wrong I was! I now know that if I plot all the leys on it in a year I will be very lucky. From the first time I laid ruler to map leys and centres leaped up at me, and it seems that there isn't a tumulus on the Island which is not a centre. Every one I have tried has proved to be - and there are still a great many more to go.”

So, yeah. You can’t walk a single mile through the Isle of Man without running into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond!

Glastonbury, which Watkins would absolutely have agreed is a ley line center, and which has been associated with VERY much ley line woo since the 1960s.

Fortunately, walking across every inch of England, sniffing out every sacred well, tree with a name, barrow, hill, and pond sounds like the loveliest of pastimes. I'd happily be a ley hunter just for the excuse to amble in straight lines back and forth across the British countryside every weekend!

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