Category Archives: Reading

Gardening, Reading

How Angela England’s “Backyard Farming” made me want a beard, sort of

I started thinking about gardening long before I actually had a place to put a garden. As we moved from rental to rental, I’d think about growing lettuce and harvesting pumpkins, and I’d plan for the day when we finally bought a house and I could start living off the land.

(Of course, I knew that it was possible to grow things in containers. But did I ever try it? No I did not. I’m a charming mixture of stubborn and lazy.)

And then we bought a house! With a yard! And a bunch of overgrown, weedy flower beds! So I ignored the flower beds and Rockford built a raised bed for vegetables and we grew one hundred million leaves of lettuce via what I like to call Beginner’s Luck. Because let me tell you what I know about gardening:

  • Fortunately there are people out there who know a lot about gardening, and one of them sent me a book all about it. It really isn’t just a gardening book, though. Angela England’s “Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less)” starts off with a brief overview of why it’s a good idea to work toward sustainable living, and it makes a good argument for it for health, environmental and economical reasons. It covers everything from purchasing an appropriate piece of land to the care and maintenance of goats to what to do once your carrot seeds have turned into carrots.

    It’s a comprehensive guide to small-scale farming, is what I’m saying.

    I doubt that we’ll ever be entirely self-sufficient, and I’m probably never going to raise chickens or goats, either. I have to say, though, that the chapter on beekeeping was so fascinating that it made me want to go out and buy one of awesome veiled beekeeper hats. And maybe some bees. But definitely the hat. And probably eventually a parade float, because I’d be the best dang beekeeper the world had ever seen, obviously, and the best dang beekeeper in the world gets invited to a lot of parades.

    (I think this book review may have just gotten away from me. What was I talking about?)

    Last weekend Rockford and one of our nephews set to work on one of the aforementioned overgrown flower beds, and after much toil they uncovered a nice bunch of irises in a row against the house. The irises are breathing freely now, and the rest of the bed will be home to our first-ever attempt at growing carrots and potatoes. The raised bed is ready for its inhabitants, too. We’re going to try for 100,000,001 leaves of lettuce this year along with a few tomatoes, some sugar snap peas, green beans and peppers.

    And do you know what I’ll have with me every step of the way? My luxurious bee-beard. My copy of “Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less),” because otherwise I would’ve asked the girl at Lowe’s where they kept the potato seeds.

    Nichole received a copy of “Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less)” for review purposes.

    Reading

    “A Good American” was just what I needed

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    Every now and then a book pops into your life at just the right moment.

    I finished “1Q84” for a book club a few weeks ago, and I hated every bit of it. (For a lot of reasons, but this post isn’t about that book.) I thought about picking up an old favorite next to cleanse the palate, so to speak, but I had other business to tend to first. I’d agreed to read Alex George’s “A Good American” for the BlogHer Book Club, and it arrived a few days before I finished “1Q84.” All I knew about it was from the few lines I’d read in the initial email from BlogHer —

    “Everything he’d seen had been unimaginably different from the dry, dour streets of home, and to his surprise he was not sorry in the slightest. He was smitten by the beguiling otherness of it all.

    And so began my grandfather’s rapturous love affair with America — an affair that would continue until the day he died.”

    — but I was hopeful. My brother and I spent a good part of the 2012 holiday season obsessively tracking branches of our family tree on Ancestry.com and musing about what had prompted our ancestors to leave their homes and come to America, so I was primed for a good immigration story.

    “A Good American” is just that. The story follows Frederick Meisenheimer — he of the “rapturous love affair with America” — from his “meet-cute” with his wife-to-be in Germany to the legacy their family leaves in small-town Missouri, and it’s written in a clear, straightforward manner befitting of its setting. (Not to say that Missouri doesn’t have its moments, but there’s a reason it’s not called the Showy State.) We lived in Columbia, Mo., for five years, and I have great memories from that time. I’m sure that connection influenced how much I liked the book, but I would’ve enjoyed it even if it had been set elsewhere.

    I carried “A Good American” around in my purse, anxious for an opportunity to keep reading. I read it courtside during Pete’s basketball practice. I read it while I waited for the water to boil and while I stirred the macaroni. I stayed up far past my bedtime reading it, and there were tears in my eyes when I finished it.

    It’s an enchanting, heartbreaking book, and it was just what I needed. I may not have known it when “A Good American” arrived at my house, but it turns out that I did pick up an old favorite to cleanse the palate after all.

    Nichole was compensated for this review via the BlogHer Book Club, but all opinions expressed are solely her own.

    Reading

    Romance meets totalitarianism in Ally Condie’s “Matched”

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    It is the future, and we have turned our lives over to the geneticists and the statisticians. In return they have given us our ideal jobs, our ideal mates and even our ideal meals, with each nutrient specially chosen to meet our unique needs. A few generations earlier, they even honed our art — music, paintings, poetry — to an essential few pieces to ensure it wouldn’t be too taxing or distracting.

    Our lives in Ally Condie’s “Matched” are programmed and predictable, safe and stolid, and we are content with that. Until one day when, perhaps, a few of us realize that there could be more.

    “Matched” is the first book in a trilogy about “The Society” and a young lady named Cassia who lives within its bounds. When we meet her, Cassia is preparing to find out who her “match” is. She’s excited and nervous at the prospect of learning her future husband’s identity, and she’s thrilled to be wearing a pretty dress for the event as opposed to her everyday “plain clothes” provided by The Society. In other words, the 17-year-old girl is a pretty believable character. She’s pleased to learn her intended’s name, but the story really gets rolling a bit later when another boy’s picture briefly shows up in his place. Is it a glitch in the system? Can there be a glitch in the system? And what if this boy truly is a better match than that other boy?

    I love dystopian fiction, and I enjoyed Condie’s vision of The Society’s sterilized world, a Utopia-with-a-price setting that owes a pretty big debt to Lois Lowry’s “The Giver.” It’s easy to imagine a world in which we’ve given up our right to choose even the most basic things in exchange for security and a guaranteed livelihood.

    Condie also very nicely illustrates the power of art and ideas in “Matched.” I don’t want to delve too deeply into that, lest we get into spoiler territory. But I think it’s safe to say that The Society was right to worry about the power of words.

    I didn’t actively dislike “Matched,” but I didn’t love the book either. I didn’t connect very strongly with Cassia or either of her potential beaus, which made it difficult for me to care much about what happened to them. For me, the balance of Action to Love Triangle was skewed a bit too heavily toward romance. If you like a heavy helping of romance with your young-adult dystopia, though, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ll enjoy “Matched.”

    Nichole was compensated for this review via the BlogHer Book Club, but all opinions expressed are solely her own.