Winter reading - what's on your book list?

Winter is upon us in the northern hemisphere. Now that the garden has been put to bed and everything is dormant, I find I have more time for things like reading. I usually keep two books going, one non-fiction and one fiction.

My non-fiction book is Keeping Bees in Horizontal Hives by Georges de Layens. I really want to get back into beekeeping, and this easy-to-read book is providing the inspiration and motivation I need!

My current fiction book is Sword of Kings from Bernard Cornwell's Saxon series. I love historical fiction, and this series has been one of the best (in my opinion, of course!) . This is the second-to-the-last book in the series, so I should be able to finish the series this winter.

I know when I finish these I'll be looking for more good books to read, so I'm curious as to what's on everybody's reading list this winter.

The current book I am reading in-between college book work (insert sigh of exhaustion) is Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian by Herrick Kimball. Next in line is Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal- War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin. Reading unassigned material at this point feels like a luxury, so I am hoping to squeeze as much personal interest reading into my winter break as I can.

I have a Leigh Tate sitting next on my list . . .

I am currently reading the second dune book. I am not sure if i will switch to the third one or read some of the books i recently took out from the library

Here is the list. Not all of them will arrive right away as some of them have 50+ people waiting to read them.

I am slowly making my way through Christopher Tolkien's "History of Middle Earth." Not 'slowly' because it's difficult, but because I don't want it to end.

Haven't been able to read a book in years. I am going to read this one!

Jordan Barton wrote:

Here is the list. Not all of them will arrive right away as some of them have 50+ people waiting to read them.

I hear you - but my name just got to the top and I've read the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass - Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin wall Kimmerer.

You might want to add it to your list, as I've read several recommendations regarding it.

I walk the property with this one in hand. Tree bark really stands out in winter and there’s no mosquitoes. For instance, the American beech doesn’t lose its leaves so it’s clearly noticed.
Invasive privet is evergreen and sticks out like the sore thumb it is. There’s also a couple more from yesterday’s walk I haven’t tried to identify yet.

Currently reading Permaculture Earthworks Handbook.  I started To Catch the Rain, the recent kick starter.  Both are great, one technical one inspiration and practical.  

Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher,
Vibrant Botanicals by Jenny McGruther,
Joel Salatins new book…

Just finished reading The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. Excellent read!  …actually a listen. I’m hooked on audibles. Put my earbuds in and listen while I do mindless chores.
And then there is my book for the kiddos. Lizzabelle and the Plastic Bottle, available on Amazon. 😊🌎

Just finished a book called Robes by Penny Kelly
Super interesting as it deals with what is happening in the world and what’s coming next.
It’ll get you fired up to Permie MORE!

I started the The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism by Matthew Wood.  Its a beautiful combination of modern day and historical anecdotes that reference the healing power of herbs .  What really jumped out for me is the fact that pharmaceuticals have only really been around for the last century (if that) and there is an entire repository of traditional medicine that barely gets acknowledged by modern medicine.  The book delves into different plants and how to use them medicinally, and being an avid gardener that has worked with these plants (or against them as so called weeds) it is immensely entertaining.  

I recently found the most amazing second-hand book store in a nearby town. My favourite kind, where the books are in stacks that you can spend all afternoon searching through! Between that and the library my book list is getting ridiculous.

We are in a bit of a food rut, so I've gotten a few cookbooks: The Whole Grain Cookbook by Livingston, Nuts in the Kitchen by Susan Hermann Loomis, and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman.

I finally got around to reading John Jeavon's How to Grow More Vegetables, which I really enjoyed. Definitely will be applying the concept of compost producing crops once I have enough land. And I have Fibreshed by Rebecca Burgess (Think 100 mile diet but for textiles/clothing) and a book on Scandinavian interior design (Relaxed Rustic by Niki Brantmark) waiting for me at the library. We've been watching a lot of Scandi dramas and I've been coveting their beautiful, simple sense of style.

Just finished 'Scaling Force' by Rory Miller. Currently into "A More Complete Beast' by Jack Donovan. Next up: reread Dr. Gad Saad's mega bestseller "The Parasitic Mind."

The Way Home: Tales of a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle.  It's funny how many some preemies can't  live without technology.  Here's a guy doing it in Ireland.   He has lived without money for several years; remember The Moneyless Man from him a couple of years. Still reading this new book, but have found it is thoughtful and worth reflection on how technology is all consuming in many areas of our life and a break allows our soul to breath and live more fully.

I am currently reading Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier land by Gary Nabhan, Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph, and After Sundown by Linda Howard. On my list is Practical Permaculture: for Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth, Grocery Row Gardening: The Exciting New Permaculture Gardening System, and a couple more Linda Howard books.

I read lots of mg (middle grade) books, around one a day or two. The one I read last night was "The Voyage of the Sparrow mmHawk", about two children and their journey to find lost family in France in the aftermath of WWI.

My last "grown-up" novel was the sequel to "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" called "Takes From the Cafe". They are wonderful bittersweet novels from Japan about a cafe where you can travel back in time but there are some odd restrictions...

I've been trying to read more nonfiction lately. I like nonfiction but when I'm tired, it's easier to read a novel than study new information. (I'm tired because I have a baby who refuses to sleep longer than 3 hours and she's almost a year old.)  I'm working my way through all the gardening books I have bought over the years and haven't read cover to cover yet. I'm almost finished with Eliot Coleman's "Winter Harvest Handbook" and now feel compelled to build a greenhouse, or at least a little low hoophouse, even though I can grow a lot of the greens in the winter without any protection that he has to grow under cover...

And I'm really trying to work my way through the one in the picture below but it's overwhelming my tired brain.  

I just finished "Roughing it in the Bush" by Susanna Moodie. It's the true account of a woman who came with her husband from England to Canada in the 1830's and homesteaded in the Canadian wilds. It is an incredible story to read when we're trying to homestead with all the modern amenities available to us! With her, if you didn't grow or hunt it, you likely went hungry. I'm going to move to her next book "Life in the Clearings versus the Bush". As for fiction, I'm halfway through Alias Grace. It's the story of a woman accused of murder in the 1800's, also set in Canada.  Actually, I think it's based on a real person but not sure about the story I'm reading.

On the to-read list for the next several months is Virus Mania,  Backyard Winter Gardening,  The Horse's Mind, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Dirt to Soil, and (if I can work up the nerve) The Real Anthony Fauci.  Just casual light reading, lol!

I almost forgot, just arrived! Dirty Genes by Dr. Ben Lynch. Really looking forward to this one!

jordan barton wrote:I am currently reading the second dune book. I am not sure if i will switch to the third one or read some of the books i recently took out from the library

Here is the list. Not all of them will arrive right away as some of them have 50+ people waiting to read them.

If the novel "Indian Horse" is the same as  a movie I saw recently, it should be an intense read.

My copy of North American Wildlife is always right on my desk because I like to ID plants, especially when someone asks a question on the forum.

The main book I want to get to in the next little while is called Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron. I heard her talking about the book on a really great podcast I listen to, Media Indigena. The book sounded super interesting. Here's the blurb from Duke University Press.

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

Gina Jeffries wrote:I'm going to move to her next book "Life in the Clearings versus the Bush". As for fiction, I'm halfway through Alias Grace. It's the story of a woman accused of murder in the 1800's, also set in Canada.  Actually, I think it's based on a real person but not sure about the story I'm reading.

I read somewhere that Life in the Clearings versus the Bush is actually where Atwood first heard of the woman that Alias Grace is based on.

I'm skipping my way through David Attenborough's recent _A Life on Our Planet_. Always a good writer, he outdoes himself in the last half of this book by describing how we may modify our food production system -- modifications already under way -- in several important ways to decrease the amount of space (and chemicals) it uses. "Rewilding" is an important new word he uses, along with some other thoughtful writers, to describe changes from mono-culture cropping, that release land that can be used to recover some of the species diversity we have lost. Much more than a typical memoir. A lot of his video productions also bring out the theme of species loss, due very much these days to habitat loss.

winter is totally reading time!!! ... i had neglected it for years and started back up a few years ago.. so glad i did !!!

i have been reading older stuff for the last couple of years. i was watching a lot of historical documentaries and although riveting, i couldn't escape the feeling that is was still modern people discussing the past..

so i figured a different way to get a sense of the past was to read what and how they wrote back then.. i wasn't disappointed..  it can be hard, but rewarding - good experiences last winter were:

slogging through "Lord Jim" (re-read since high school)
chilled by "Frankenstein"
mesmerized by "1984"
underwhelmed by "A Brave New World"

in all cases the language of the time was "different".. reading engages the imagination and so older books doubles down on that... it's like meeting someone from 200 years ago.. you are challenged to interpret their entire frame of reference because it is different from your own... (kinda similar to watching a classic movie... no internet, no cell phones)..

the batshit overly-ambitious list for this year incudes:

"Dracula"
"Crime and Punishment"
"Meditations" (Marcus Aurelius)
"The sun also Rises"
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (re-read)
"Letters" (Kurt Vonnegut)
"War of The Worlds"

i don't read a lot on non-fiction anymore - i have TONS of gardening books and am a sucker for a good documentary with historical footage when i want to learn that kinda stuff - but i do hope to find a copy of "Silent Spring" soon - i only buy used books (too $$ online with shipping)  and i can't read electronically so a lot of my reading list is, well, what is at Value Village or the used book store when i go to Sydney (big city lol) - actually kinda fun and evokes some older memories of the days of "bookstores"!

to be fair i do alternate with something light like Michael Crichton or John Grisham or Anne Rice.. sorta like reading a teevee show lol!

happy reading everyone!

James MacKenzie wrote:
underwhelmed by "A Brave New World"


the batshit overly-ambitious list for this year incudes:

"Dracula"
"Crime and Punishment"
"Meditations" (Marcus Aurelius)
"The sun also Rises"
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (re-read)
"Letters" (Kurt Vonnegut)
"War of The Worlds"

My favourite Huxley book is Point Counter Point. Maybe you'd enjoy that one more than Brave New World. I haven't read it since I was a teenager, though. It might not be as clever as I remember 😁

Crime and Punishment remains one of my favourite novels ever. I hope you like it! If you do, read more Dostoyevsky! It's all great.

Thanks for reminding me of Vonnegut's Letters. I binged Vonnegut early in life. His novels were the shortest on my parents' bookshelf and, therefore, the least intimidating to me as a child. It didn't hurt that God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater had a drawing of a guy sitting on a toilet on the cover. What kid wouldn't be drawn in?😂

James MacKenzie wrote:winter is totally reading time!!! ...  - i only buy used books (too $$ online with shipping)  and i can't read electronically so a lot of my reading list is, well, what is at Value Village or the used book store when i go to Sydney (big city lol) - actually kinda fun and evokes some older memories of the days of "bookstores"

Used bookstore and the thrift store are the best!!!

I haven't bought a new book in years and the last time I did buy a new book, it was a permaculture book- not the kind I'm likely to find used.

Anything new that I just have to read, I request from my library which is awesome at fulfilling requests. Lately they have been getting a lot of gardening books and even permaculture books so that's pretty cool because those books are pricey!! And I'm pretty patient so really popular books are usually in abundance at thrift stores if I wait a few years after they are published. I also do a lot of e-reading, usually from the library, but occasionally I'll pay a few dollars for new authors that aren't super popular yet.

I just ordered some books to get through this winter but am one of those people that read multiple books. Timber Framing books, Earthbag building books, Basic Fermentation, cheese making, Permaculture Design Manual. I'm going through some interesting times so still from last winter I'm trying to through When the Body Says No, Gabor Mate; Childhood Disrupted, Donna Jackson Nakazawa & a group of different cook books including Kate Downham's A year in an Off-Grid Kitchen. I do buy most of my books used when possible and often find I'll read more online about a topic including YouTube and Podcasts. Also this site has a rediculous amount of info thanks to everyone on the site, I'm still working my way through all Paul's podcasts and freebies from all the Kickstarters.

the power of kindness by piero ferrucci

My dog chewed this up right after I received it, so I've reordered it.  I look forward to reading it!  HOW TO OPT-OUT OF THE TECHNOCRATIC STATE: By Derrick Broze

J James wrote:"Just finished a book called Robes by Penny Kelly
Super interesting as it deals with what is happening in the world and what’s coming next.
It’ll get you fired up to Permie MORE!"  

Not sure how this "quote and reply" thing works, but I love Penny Kelly and her books and classes. Another book that Permies might like is "The Elves Of Lily Hill Farm" also by Penny Kelly....a little entree into cooperative gardening with Nature Spirits..fascinating.

Currently "The Living" by Annie Dillard next I  am going to read my daughters book, "way to War" 2nd book in the Way City Chronicles. If interested you can get it at... sorry all you " no amazoners"
https://www.amazon.com/Way-War-City-Chronicles/dp/B09M5LJTLB/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1640631712&refinements=p_27%3AM.+C.+Hutton&s=books&sr=1-1#immersive-view_1640631885073

I've started and am a couple articles into "Low Technology Magazine," volume 2. The first volume was absolutely fascinating and I'm looking to dig into this one, too.

Beyond that, I am re-reading "Game Design From Start to Finish" by Dr. Lew Pulsipher, and earnestly-restarting "Bright Green Lies" by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert after stalling out this past summer.

Escape the City: A How-To Homesteading Guide Vol 1 & 2 by Travis J I Corcoran
Going from the book description, the author covers a wide range of topics in extensive detail while taking care to cover the basics for people who have never set foot on a farm before, such as talking about the difference between straw and hay.

Lamson Nguyen wrote:Escape the City: A How-To Homesteading Guide Vol 1 & 2 by Travis J I Corcoran.

I received my copies of this last year as well! The books are very impressive. It's pretty much an extensive, encyclopedic treatment of the topic and I'm certain it will be worth the read/re-read/notes/etc. through both volumes.

I've been reading the collected works of E.H. Wilson http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Wilson%2C%20Ernest%20Henry%2C%201876%2D1930