The Dirty Life

For a non-fiction book, this one was incredibly interesting. It's sort of a biography - Ms. Kimball is a writer from New York who interviews a farmer who is trying to do a CSA model farm. CSA = community supported agriculture - basically a farm that provides everything necessary for the surrounding community. While doing the interview, Kimball falls in love with the farmer ("Mark"), and they decide to start a new farm. However, for this new farm, their dream is to provide an entire subsistence for the community (not just vegetables, but meat, dairy, grains, everything.

They begin a new 500 acre farm. The book largely chronicles their decision to do so, and the first year on the farm. The author takes you through delivering a calf from a mother cow, to how to properly plow a field. The couple decided to do the farm with the least amount of machinery possible. They had a tractor, but it was for backup. They mostly operated using a pair of draft horses (think "Budweiser ads" and you'll know what sort of horses those are).

The author, being a writer, used a plethora of books to learn different parts of farming. She references several of these books, which makes it even more interesting. I finished the book, and almost immediately put most of the books she mentioned on my wishlist.

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are
continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is
continually fighting to overtake the field. Inside the ramparts are the
sativas, the cultivated plants, soft and vulnerable, too highbred and civilized
for fighting. Aligned with nature, there are the weeds, tough foot
soldiers, evolved for battle. As we approached the solstice, both sides
were at full tilt, stoked by rain and abundance of sun. Every morning,
Mark and I would look out over the fields at first light and see a fresh haze of
green. For every one of ours, there were a hundred, a thousand, ten
thousand of theirs, wave after wave, unending."

A fun book to read.

So Cold the River

This was a new thriller off of the Amazon 2010 list. I'd never heard of this author before, but the book sounded interesting, so I started with it. The main character, Eric Shaw, is a film-maker who specializes in wedding and funeral videos. He gets hired to do a life sketch for a dying man in Chicago, by returning to the man's childhood home, and investigating his background. Along the way, Shaw meets and discovers all kinds of interesting and spooky things about the town, the history, and a certain bit of evil that he unwittingly brings with him to the valley.

What I like best in thrillers (I may have said this before - if so, sorry!), is an interesting story, and writing that keeps you engaged. I have trouble with authors who continually use the same genre and story over and over again, just tweaking the characters and the stories. If you're writing a thriller, I like it to be something unique and creative. This book is definitely that - the main instigator of the evil is a 100-year old bottle of water, and the water around the village.

Further, the book keep you going. The characters are interesting - you learn just enough about most of them to care about what happens (or enough to hope the bad guys get what's coming to them). I read this over a weekend, and recommend both it and any of the other books by this same author.

Secrets in the Fire - Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell is a Swedish author, who divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique. While on one of his trips to Africa, he met a woman named Sofia Alface, who forms the basis for this book. While this book is fiction, it is largely based on Sofia's life. Sofia was driven from her childhood home after "bandits" came and killed her father and sibling. Sofia's mother, Sofia, and her older sister and younger brother all travelled across the country, and eventually settled in a new village. After living in the new village for a few weeks (or maybe months), Sofia accidentally left the worn path between work and home, and stepped on a landmine. Sofia's older sister later died from her injuries from the blast, and Sofia lost both of her legs from the mine.

This book is about how Sofia recovered, and her enduring spirit in showing others how to treat adversity. She ultimately got two new legs, and returned to her village.

The book is written for teen audiences, so it reads exceptionally fast (I think I finished it in a day). The story, however, is compelling. There's also a post-script from a land-mine NGO, offering several facts and figures about the threat of landmines today. There is a subsequent book about Sofia, also by Mankell, that chronicles her life after her return to the village. I strongly urge anyone to read the book - if nothing more than to learn about the threat of landmines.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

A slow start ends with a bang. This is the story of a staid English Major who's wife recently died, and how he adapts to living in the English countryside. He befriends a Pakistani shop-keeper whose husband also recently died. Of course, in the old-school English village in which they live, this creates quite a scandal. Other scandal follows the Pakistani woman. A couple of hilarious scenes ensue, including a local dance-party, set to a theme of British domination of the Indian subcontinent. Needless-to-say, this theme doesn't sit well with the Indian and Pakistani folk who are helping to cater and decorate the event, and a melee ensues.

Add to the mix the local "Lord" and his yearly duck-hunt behind the local schoolyard (and the fact that the children ran onto the shooting ground to save "their" ducks), and the Major's son who is more interested in his own career advancement than familial relations, and the book have some very hilarious moments. It takes a little while to get into it, and really start caring for the Major (as opposed to being off-put by his English traditionalism), but once you do, you really get into the story.

The love story element here between the Major and Mrs. Ali gives the book something for just about everyone. Anyone would be good to give it a try.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

(Sorry about the small picture)

This book was excellent! I approached it with a little trepidation (I was trying to read Skippy Dies! and just not getting into it, so I thought I'd try something else. Since this one is also about teenagers at a private school, I wasn't sure what to expect.) This book is about a girl who's a senior at an exclusive private school in New York, but who's in danger of not graduating. Her "absentee" father takes her to Paris to work on her school project. While there, she discovers an old diary from around the time of the French Revolution. The story jumps between the modern girl, and the girl in the diary.

Lots of French Revolution history, as well as musical background (specifically classical guitar - the girl is doing her senior project on the "musical DNA" passed down by past guitarists). I really liked the way the author interwove the history with the modern story. Also, you learn early on in the book that the girl suffered the loss of her little brother, and blames herself. However, it's not until almost the end of the book that you learn the full story of her brother's death.

There's a little bit of romance in Paris that livens things up a bit. There's a lot of humor on the New York end, specifically with her other friends and the projects they are working on. I read the whole book in about 2 days - that's how much it draws you in. All in all, a good read. I've added Donnelly's other book ("A Northern Light") to my reading list, and may post on it soon as well.

Buy vs. Rent

For those who don't know, I used to buy almost every book I read. In the last few years however, we've become a lot more discriminatory in the books that we'll actually buy. (By "we", I actually mean "I" or "Me". It's not like my wife spends a lot of money on books!). Each week, we take our kids to the local library. Our library is set up with a bunch of other libraries around, where they have an extensive interlibrary loan system. Just about any book you could want can be found in at least one of these libraries, which makes it available at our library, if you put it on the wait list.

So, our kids love the place. The boys really enjoy the kid books about dinosaurs, trucks, planes, etc. Our six-year-old has recently gotten into the "drawing" books, where he can learn to draw new things. Our oldest has discovered that they have a "teen" section - and she spends a lot of her time there.

Anyway, because we are at the library so often, if there's a book that my wife or I want to read, we'll check it out from the library, rather than buy it. We've gotten to where we buy the books that we think are really good (or ones that we want to have in our own home library. Of course, most of my home library is in boxes in the garage, but that's a whole 'nother story!) So, if you see on here that I actually bought the book, then you know it has to be good!

Unbroken - by Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand is the author of "Seabiscuit" - the book from which the movie was made. (For those of you who don't read - yes, Seabiscuit was based on a book!). This newest book, Unbroken, is about a World War II vet named Louie Zamperini. Zamperini was a world-class runner, thought by many to potentially be the first person in the world to break a 4-minute mile. He ran in college and the Olympics before WW II started. The first part of the book covers this portion of his life.

After WW II started, Louie joined the Army Air Corps, where he ended up as a bombardier in a B-24. (For those who don't know, the bombardier is the person charged with aiming and dropping the bombs - a B-24 was a bomber used extensively in WW II, especially in the Pacific.) After a while, and several "successful" trips, his plane was shot down (or crashed - can't remember if it was actually shot down), while on a rescue trip for another plane that had been shot down. Louie, the pilot, and one other member of their crew survived the crash. Louie and the pilot survived about 2000 miles of ocean crossing on their life raft (covering about 45 days), and were then captured and put into various Japanese POW camps.

The book tells the story of Louie's life. The author had extensive interviews with both him, and lots of others. There was plenty of news coverage of the events, due to Louie's past running prowess. Hillenbrand's writing style is enough to draw you into the story, and make you wonder what ever happens to the guy. (I wouldn't necessarily say it's "captivating" - but, after all, the book's not a novel, it's a historical biography. I don't know if that genre is supposed to be captivating.)

Lots of other folks have reviewed this book, it's been fairly popular. My wife and I checked it out from the library often enough, we just weren't able to ever get more than a few pages in before we had to return it (the wait list was long - so we couldn't just renew it). From what we'd seen, it was good enough that we ended up just buying it.