Day: December 20, 2011

by Jenna Woginrich

This book continues where her previous one left off. Woginrich continues to strive to live her dream of homesteading. She moves into a new place, a rented cabin in a small community in Vermont. Continues gardening, raising chickens and rabbits. Adds sheep, ducks, geese, a turkey, a goat and a sheepdog to her little farm. Most of the book is not really details about the animals, or even about her efforts to raise her own food. For all she loves sheep, I learned more about what it\’s actually like to keep them from this other book. There\’s not much mention of her practices of animal husbandry, for example, until she has to defend someone\’s accusations on how she keeps them. There\’s hardly any mention of the garden, except for that she has one. It came across to me that the focus was her emotional journey. She talks a lot about her longings, dreams and plans, and then describes how she goes about acquiring them. There are welcoming neighbors who help her along the way, and suspicious ones who report her (unfounded) for animal cruelty. In the end, she discovers she can\’t stay forever at the cabin and undergoes a frantic search for a piece of land to own.

Barnheart was a quick, focused read. I really admired the tenacity which she had, to stick to her goals. She didn\’t mind if she looked odd to her neighbors (or even her own family) but just went ahead and found classes in the things she wanted to learn, found someone to trade sheep with her, found friends who liked fiddling, neighbors who helped her build a sheep shed, a whole community of people living the same kind of lifestyle (with a surprising variety of backgrounds). Her enthusiasm is catching, her honesty refreshing, her love for this way of life very obvious. I enjoyed reading her little book and have recently subscribed to her blog so I can follow along with her doings. I don\’t know if I\’ll ever have a homestead (or even if I want to) but I do love gardening, and want to have a few chickens someday (maybe rabbits too) so it\’s nice to see someone living that dream and far beyond it.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 184 pages, 2011

I\’ve spent the last week or so organizing my TBR list. The main focus of my task was to separate the list into the books I can find at my local library, and those that are unavailable. I don\’t know how many times I\’ve gone to the library with a list of titles I was currently interested in, only to find most of them weren\’t in the system. Frustrating. So I\’ve looked them all up and now know that even if I have to wait for something to travel from another branch, at least all the books on this list are there. It\’s satisfying to know that.

The list of books not at the library, dubbed TBR etc, is full of titles I\’ll just ignore for now. Someday I might search for them on swap sites, or purchase those I really really think I\’ll like, but I have no idea when. I\’ve had a policy for a long time of borrowing books to read before I decide buy them, to keep the number of purchases down. It would be hard to start breaking that habit, especially where there\’s still so much on the regular TBR that I can still read at no cost.

I\’ve also sorted the list a little more, especially with the nonfiction books, to make finding things easier. I\’m not quite sure how to sort the fiction, which is the next-longest segment of the list…. It was interesting to see how the list broke apart when I started searching the library\’s catalog. About half the classics and nonfiction I want to read are available. Most of the YA books, two-thirds of the fiction and fantasy are available too. But less than a third of the animal books I\’m interested in are. It was also eye-opening to go through the entire list in detail. I\’m eager again to read many books I had completely forgotten were on my list. I found quite a few books that I\’d read and not removed. And a number that were in the wrong place- fiction titles listed as memoirs, for example. Now it all feels tidy, and much more accessible. The list is not nearly so intimidating anymore. It feels manageable. I rather believe I might actually read all these books someday.

It will add an extra step whenever I add a bunch of titles to my TBR, because now I\’ll go look them up in the library catalog first. But I\’m hoping it will save me some time and frustration down the road.

DISCLAIMER:

All books reviewed on this site are owned by me, or borrowed from the public library. Exceptions are a very occasional review copy sent to me by a publisher or author, as noted. Receiving a book does not influence my opinion or evaluation of it

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