O Pioneers! is talky, talky, talky and boring, boring, boring. No wonder high school students hate it. I am far past high school, but I could not get through it, either. Cather seems to write chapters for the sake of cranking out pages, but many chapters go nowhere and lead to nothing. Like one chapter where she goes with her brothers to visit a strange Russian named Ivar who has peculiar ideas on how to raise pigs. Does she go into the hog butchering business? Or big time hog farming? Does she even follow his advice? No. Nothing happens and the hogs don't come up again. And her endless descriptions of the scenery are enough to make me wish she got stranded in the Gobi Desert. She just can't stop with the scenery, which makes up a good half of the book. Maybe she should have been a painter.