Goodreads

I joined the goodreads social network yesterday. I've had friends mention this site, but I think I confused it with another book-related site I had tried and discarded a while back. Anyway, I'm totally excited about having a place to put my "To-Read" list (outside of my clunky Excel document) and keeping track of the books I've read. And the books other people read! I just posted this review of a book I read recently, and they provided html for posting into my blog. I probably won't post these reviews here often, I just wondered how it worked. If anyone reading this is already part of goodreads, please search for me and add me as a friend. The librarian in me is ridiculously excited about this site! :-)


*Aside about being a librarian* I was thinking they other day how I have always sort of downplayed my decision to be a librarian as a lame choice. Not because I think librarians are lame, but because I picked that career just because I liked books. (Well, and because library school was in the same city as Evan White, but I digress.) While thinking about how my brain works, though, and the things I get excited about, I realize there is a lot of librarian in me by nature! I get crazily excited by organizing information and things, whether it be alphabetizing my books, making sure I keep my striped and solid shirts in their separate places in my drawer (stop laughing at me, Olivia!), putting pictures in photo albums, or documenting my reading on goodreads. So I think I picked the right career path. Even better, it doesn't hurt to love organization in my FAVORITE job as a stay-at-home mom!



Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land by Kurt Timmermeister

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked this book because I love small farms, and local eating, and stories about people learning a new career. This book has all of that, but it lacked a good editor. The story is not grouped chronologically, which made it very choppy. He also contradicts himself quite frequently. He starts one paragraph with the sentence "Pigs abhor electrical current, which makes them easy to confine." Three paragraphs later, his opening sentence is "Pigs are great escapers." Pigs won't eat pork; Mama pigs eat their young. Pigs will find every scrap of food and eat it; pigs trample the food and then ignore it and beg for more food. LOTS of these examples. He went into excruciating detail about minutiae of farming, but never mentioned several aspects of his life and farm. His leftist political leanings colored his essays in a mean-spirited way. One insight I did enjoy is his assertion that Craigslist may resurrect small farms. He contrasted trying to find feeder pigs before and after Craigslist. Very interesting! Little tidbits like that kept me reading, and also made me wish he'd had a heavier-handed editor so I could enjoy the book as a whole.



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