Friday Fives!

This week at Friday Fives, the question is: 

What are the FIVE (book or movie) worlds you would love to live in?

1) I've scouted out some of the other responses,  and it seems that few can resist the allure of Harry Potter.  And neither can I, if only to go to Honeydukes and drink some Butterbeer.  I mean, seriously.  But definitely post-Voldemort.

2)  Lyra's Oxford from the His Dark Materials series (or really, wherever in that world).  I mean, yes, that series makes me cry as hard as anything I've ever read, but to just sort of be a normal person living there--having a daemon is possibly the coolest idea I've encountered. 

3)  Little House on the Prairie.  Yes, their lives were incredibly intense and hard a lot of the time, but unlike other historical periods/places that interest me (Austen's England, Wharton's New York), women on the prairie had a chance to break out of some of the traditional social roles.  And the "women's work" was a different kind of thing--yes, it was cooking and laundry in the home, or teaching outside the home.  But it was cooking dinner over a fire, or if you were lucky, in a big cast iron cookstove--full of fire.  It was cleaning and butchering a dead rabbit, or chopping off frozen chunks of carcass in the winter, or stretching three cups of cornmeal into two days' food for six people.  Laundry was backbreaking, sweaty labor, involving giant tubs of scalding water, stirring and lifting and wringing heavy fabrics that became unbelievably heavy when wet.  And teaching--still not an easy job under any circumstances--was in a tiny room in the middle of nowhere, with no other adults around, and with students ranging from the tiniest ones learning to read, to the big boys who only came long enough to run off the teacher, or beat him until he eventually died of his injuries which is something that gets casually mentioned in Farmer Boy.  Wow, this does not explain why I want to live there at ALL.  Um, they make sugar-on-snow candy and sometimes there are horses?

4) The world of Carolyn Haywood's Betsy books (not to be confused with the also-charming Betsy-Tacy books).  I guess as an adult, this is less applicable, but these books just entranced me when I was a kid.  They were from my mom's era of "Why don't you go play kick-the-can in the street until it's dark," and I grew up in a not-so-nice neighborhood where the only other kids when I was young was were little boys next door who stole my tricycle and then burned down their house.  So while the Betsy books are realistic (well, idealized, but at least possible) they seemed like a fairy tale to me in a lot of ways.

5)  This may be cheating, but pretty much any world created by Aaron Sorkin.  Like reality, but with much better dialogue!  And people try to do the right thing and be honorable and then give speeches about being honorable!  And the speeches sound so good!  (Ok, really, this is just a preview of next week's Friday Fives, I guess.)