Animal Vegetable Miracle

I LOVE Barbara Kingsolver. When Della introduced me to her I immediately read everything she ever wrote (sadly, not nearly as many books as I had hoped). Well, now she has a new one that J gave me for Christmas. I just started reading it 5 minutes ago and I am only to page 11, but it is FANTASTIC. So I thought I would post right away so that you would all go read it immediately and wouldn't have to suffer through one more minute of not reading this book. But you are going to have to go get your own copy, because there is no way you are going to be able to pry it out of my hands. Jeremy has already been circling suspiciously. I guess there is a possibility that once I read more than 10 pages that my ardor will cool, but I doubt it. I will let you know. Anyway, here is a tasty tidbit for you:

(Upon moving from Tuscon, AZ to Virginia--thoughts on agriculture in the US)
"We also have convinced ourselves it (farming) wasn't too important. Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-th-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

If that is true, why isn't it good enough for someone else to know multiplication and the contents of the Bill of Rights? Is the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, less relevant to our lives than the history of the 13 colonies? Couldn't one make a case for the relevance of a subject that informs choices we make daily--as in, What's for dinner? Isn't ignorance of our food sources causing problems as diverse as overdependence on petroleum, and an epidemic of diet-related diseases?

If this book is not exactly an argument for reinstating food-production classes in schools (and it might be), it does contain a lot of what you might learn there. From our family's gas-station beginnings we have traveled far enough to discover ways of taking charge of one's food, and even knowing where it has been. This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them.

(skipping forward a little)

Absence of that knowledge (farming) has rendered us a nation of wary label readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat. We call our food animals by different names after they're dead, presumably sparing ourselves any vision of the beefs and the porks running around on actual hooves. Our words for unhealthy contamination--"soiled" or "dirty"--suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea o eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew."

One more opinion

Here is Time's thoughts on the matter,one's non-fiction and the second is fiction:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1691768,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1691840,00.html

One lady's opinion

Here's the Boston Globe's pick for the best fiction of 2007, if you're interested. I'll also post Time's when I find it.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/12/02/the_best_fiction_of_2007/

Mystery/Chick Lit/Historical Fiction

Just read 2 books that fit into all those categories. The first was Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear. It was heavier on the mystery and I think it is actually a sequel to a book called Maisie Dobbs, which I suspect of being better than this one. This was a good book, but it kept referring to interesting stuff in the first book that I hadn't read.

The second cross genre book was a little heavier on the chick lit side. It was the Deception of the Emerald Ring by Lauren Willig and it was so fun! I bought it because it said "Pride and Prejudice lives on" on the front so I thought it was a retelling or something. Well, I was originally disappointed when it showed NO resemblance to P and P and I had been drawn in! But it turned out to be a fun adventure. It is also part of a series, and this is a series I plan on working my way through. Here is a teaser:

"In the course of her long career as de facto keeper of the Alsworthy menage, Letty had confronted all manner of domestic disruption, from exploding Christmas puddings to indignant tradesmen, and even, on one memorable occasion, escaped livestock. Letty had bandaged burns, coaxed her little brother's budgie out of tree, and stage-managed her family's yearly remove to a rented town house in London.

An attempted elopement was something new.

The whole situation was straight out of the comic stage: the daughter of the house hastily packing in the middle of the night with the help of her trusty (and soon to be unemployed) maid, the faithful lover waiting downstairs with a speedy carriage, ready to whisk them away to Gretna Green. All that was needed was a rope ladder and an irate guardian in hot pursuit.

That role, Letty realized fell to her. It didn't seem quite fair, but there it was. She had to stop Mary.

But how? Remonstrating with Mary wouldn't be any use. Over the past few years, Mary had made it quite clear that she didn't care to take advice from a sister, and a younger sister at that. She responded to Letty's well-meaning suggestions with the unblinking disdain perfected by cats in their dealings with their humans. Letty knew just how Mary would react. She would hear Letty out without saying a word, and then calmly go on to do whatever it was she had intended to do in the first place.

Rousing her parents would be worse than useless. Her father would simply blink at her over his spectacles and comment mildly that if Mary wished to make a spectacle of herself, it would be best to let her get on with it as quickly as possible and with as little trouble to themselves as could be had. As for her mother...Letty's face twisted in a terrible grimace that would undoubtedly lead to all sorts of unattractive wrinkles later in life. There was certainly no help to be found from that quarter. Her mother would probably help Mary into his lordship's carriage.

Letty looked longingly at the (fire) poker. She couldn't, though. She really couldn't."

No Flying in the House

I read a book recently by Betty Brock called No Flying in the house. Most little girls have parents to take care of them but not Annabel Tippens. She has Gloria, a tiny white dog who talks and wears a gold collar Annabel never thought it was strange that she had Gloria instead of real parents. Until one day a wicked, wicked cat named Belinda comes to tell her the truth- she's not just a girl she is half fairy!
And she can do lots of things that other kids can't do such as kiss her elbow and fly around the house. But being a fairy isn't all fun and games, and soon Annabel must make a choice. If she chooses to be a fairy she'll have to say good-bye to Gloria forever.
I thought that this was a really great book. I think everyone should read it. I tried to find another book by this lady on Amazon. But the book was $55.00. It was a collectors item. I got this one for free at my school during "week of the young reader" week.

- by Madeline A.