Thank you, going to record!

I’ll be watching. I enjoy almost all the PBS shows.

I liked the books when I was young, and now after having read more about the family I look at the books differently, and still appreciate them. What an interesting life.

Yeah, pap, but I always have to watch new versions.

I've been enjoying the current run of Unforgotten. Ends tonight.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/unforgotten/episodes

Never read the book - I’m watching.

I loved this book when I was young and still do. There's a reason it's a classic. Any movie version is like a new twist on fried chicken, meatloaf or mashed potatoes.

Angela Lansbury is wonderful as Aunt March.

I wasn't too impressed. And like all movies and programs now days, there has to be violence and loud conflict. I guess slapping and meanness wasn't something the early versions would have wanted to include. ha

I thought it was enjoyable. Not another Downton Abbey, but pretty good. All the characters are too sweet and kind to be true. If my sister had burned my manuscript, I would have held her under when she fell through the ice.

It was okay. So I pulled out my old book and started reading. As always, some "adjustments" and compression in timing of events and "who said what, when". But hey, anything that gets me reading again is a good thing.

I gave up after 15 minutes.

It didn't hold my attention at all, which surprised me. Switched to another show.

I quickly lost interest as well and turned it off.

FYI - I read today that the young woman playing Jo is the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.

i had trouble getting into it and won’t be watching the rest of it. I watched the finale of Unforgotten and then switched over to Brit Box and watched the last episode of the latest in the Shetland series. Those I enjoyed.

I actually watched the whole thing, then switched to WW, just to clarify.

Interesting fact chickadee, now I can recall the resemblance to Uma.

I think it is ok. To be honest, even as a child, I never really liked the book. Just too sentimental and not enough plot to hold interest.

I like the actress playing Marmee.

Rereading the book as an adult, I'm enjoying just how unsentimental it is! Well, okay, a bit, but I wonder if Laurie is actually gay or just very introverted, and that's why he attaches to Jo, then later to Amy the artist? And poor Amy is just so twelve, with wanting to fit in with her friends at that age. The bickering, the intelligent play, it almost made me wish I'd had sisters lol. Almost. And I've been getting my dictionary out to understand word usage from the time, so that's good.

I do enjoy reading books from my youth, I see them in a totally different way, and maybe more in the way the author wrote it.

I actually have always liked Louisa May Alcott, but then I love 19th-century trash literature, too. But I never liked Little Women because those girls have to be punished constantly for being normal girls. Meg can't get dressed up for a party without having to be shamed for it, Amy suffers all kinds of tortures for wanting the same normal things the other girls in her class have (the limes). Jo gets the worst punishment of all in having to marry that old scold Bhaer, who is made as completely unappealing physically as a character can be, when it's obvious that she should have married Laurie, etc.

After I learned about LMA's own childhood, it made more sense. I frankly consider her father guilty of child abuse, even if not physical. All that business with the apples to try to purify her evil dark-haired spirit.

Bronson Alcott was definitely one of the nuttier nuts of the Transcendental movement of the time, especially with Fruitlands! He did almost starve the family at one time. Even Emerson thought he has overboard.

Writersblock, true about the punishing. I just read a chapter where the girls decide to take a day off from chores, and because no one thought to feed Beth's little bird, it died. Whoa! A little harsh!

Yeah, but I doubt LMA thought so. As Emory mentioned, she was brought up in a state of semi-starvation a lot of the time, with the family living on the produce of their apple trees and the occasional loaf of graham bread.

There was a very prevalent belief in that group that whiteness = purity, so the lighter anything was, the better it was. That applied to people, too. A blue-eyed blonde was innately spiritually superior to a brown-eyed one, a dark-haired person with blue eyes would be the next step down in temptation to be bad, and so on.

Poor LMA was the dark-haired, dark-eyed kid, so Bronson used to do things like putting this always-very-hungry child in a room with an apple on the table, telling her that only a very wicked child would eat it without permission, and then leaving the two of them (the apple and LMA) alone together all day. Of course, starvation would eventually win out and then the rest of the family would return to mourn over her ineradicably evil and selfish nature.

There were other weird manifestations of this in their circle, too. Sophia Peabody, the sister of one of Bronson's teaching assistants (and eventually Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne), was practically incapacitated as a girl by terrible headaches, which I suspect had something to do with the fact that her mother kept her (an already semi-pure blue-eyed blonde) on a diet of only white foods: white sugar, white flour, milk, and occasionally white meat chicken, those being the purest and therefore the best foods.

At any rate, LMA certainly appreciated the sacrifice of the luxurious Christmas breakfast in the book in a way few other people ever could.

Hawthorne's novel, The Blithedale Romance, is about the follies of the Transcendentalist commune. It is perhaps one of his lesser known novels but my favorite.

I love the Walden Pond area because you get to see the homes of so many of these 19th century writers, visionaries, and quacks!