I’ve actually been reading quite a bit since the January 1, but haven’t taken the time to write it up.
Books Read So Far in January:
This one was pretty dense. I actually got it for Christmas of 2011, but this was my second go at it. I would not recommend this as a book for a beginning gardener, but if you have a little experience under your belt and you’re interested in self-sufficiency, this book has a lot of good information in it. Carol Deppe’s writing style is very… empirical, for lack of a better word. I liked her experimental approach to gardening, although I found some of her recipes a bit weird and heavy on the use of a microwave. Her focus is on staples you can grow that don’t take lots of time, water, or care to produce (corn, beans, squash, potatoes, and duck eggs), and because she is writing from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, she focuses on varieties that do well in that climate. It was a bit frustrating at times, being in Mississippi, to hear over and over again: “We grow this kind here and also this kind grows well in the Northeast. I hear that such-and-such does well in the South, but I’m not going to focus on that.” Understandable, of course, since we can only garden where we are, but still — a little frustrating if you’re a Southern gardener. One of the most interesting facets of the book, however, is that Deppe has celiac disease, and so all of her recommendations for growing and cooking with various staples are gluten-free.
I discovered this novel on a 2012 wrap-up list for 52 Books. I tried really hard to resist adding it to my already full TBR shelves, especially at Christmastime, but in the end I crumbled and downloaded it onto my Kindle.
Here’s the description from Amazon:
When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead–a suicide–in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them.
What’s interesting about this book is that it’s a story told by a secular Jewish narrator about a conflict between an anthropologist who is increasingly subsumed by the culture she comes to study and a family of Protestant Christian missionaries. What’s more, I thought the missionaries were portrayed fairly. They come through as well-meaning, but human characters, neither saints nor devils. And — as a grad-school anthropology drop-out myself — I thought his portrayal of anthropology and anthropologists was very, very good.
After a long warm period during the years of the medieval period, around the year 1300 the climate suddenly turned colder, with wild weather changes that made life in Europe and North America much more unpredictable. Reading this book after Carol Deppe’s Resilient Gardener was eye-opening, since much of the book focused on how the weather ruined harvests and contributed to famines, plagues, political unrest, and emigration patterns. A little shakier, in my opinion, is the author’s continued assertion that human industry is all that is driving current climate change, when he spends most of the book talking about how little is known about the mechanisms of climate change in general, and certainly about why the climate suddenly changed from warm to cold in the 14th century.
Lots of practical advice about meal planning in general, but especially when using unprocessed, whole foods.
Real Food on a Real Budget: How to Eat Healthy for Less (Stephanie Langford)
More practical advice on how to eat whole foods (especially items like raw milk, grass-fed meat, and organic vegetables) without breaking even a small budget. I thought this book had a lot of good ideas, some of which (like using cash) have been reiterated over and over again on the Internet and in books, but it was nice having it all wrapped up in one package and applied specifically to “real food” — which can be more expensive than the advertised specials in the typical grocery flyer.
I’ve also been doing some research on freezer cooking — trying to figure out how to stock a month’s worth of gluten-free meals for my large family when the baby comes. Cookbooks I’ve been reading through — Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook 
Find more books and reviews at 52 Books in 52 Weeks!
Three Plus Two Homeschool 