Unfamiliar Fishes, Still Life {Book Hounds}

Today I want to recommend two strange, wonderful books: Unfamiliar Fishes and Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy. Next week I'll share two food related texts but with our upcoming vacation and many of you perhaps looking for a quirky summer read, I offer these. Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell is the strange story of the multicultural settling of the Hawaiian islands. In her characteristic humorous sarcastic tone, Sarah Vowel somehow makes the story of a culture co-opted by religious zealots fascinating. I learned so much in this book including why the Hawaiian language has so many vowel sounds (there are only a few allowed consonants), how Protestant sexual monogamy managed to win over native promiscuity, and how natives spent thousands of hours creating handmade textiles from native bird feathers.

Sarah Vowell immerses herself in a culture while writing about it and intersperses historical text with personal stories of visiting modern Hawaiian islands. These moments are sometimes tender, sometimes funny, and always illustrative.

When we travel to the Big Island on Saturday, I will be more sensitive to the native issues and history because of Unfamiliar Fishes.

In Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, author Melissa Milgrom finds herself searching after the meaning of modern and historical stuffed animals. She explores the beginnings of taxidermy when scientists attempted to recreate live animals to show them to the public and the heyday of the 'art' form when museums around the world employed teams of animal sculptors.

Milgrom continues her journey with a visit to a contemporary artist, Emily Mayer, who makes waves in the modern art world by collaborating with Damien Hirst on installations involving everything from cows to sharks preserved in various mediums.

Readers are also treated to carefully-described tours through Smithsonian labs, personal studios of those competing in the World Taxidermy Championship (yes, there is such a thing), and museums of curiousities. From descriptions of the most kitschy versions of mounted fish to conversations with those who truly believe in the art of recreating life with a dead animal's body, Milgrom pulls together a book that is full of wonder and respect for a rarely-examined field of work.

I highly recommend Unfamiliar Fishes or Still Life for readers wanting delve into something that will leave you feeling normal in comparison while entertaining and educating you along the way. Or for anyone wanting to understand a little about how my own quirky preferences work as I was thrilled by these very strange books.

Now I need your recommendations for books to read on our upcoming vacation. I tend towards oddball non-fiction, memoirs, and biographies. Ideas?

Disclosure: Book titles and covers are Amazon affiliate links.

Easter Egg Books: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue {Book Hounds}

Our family doesn't celebrate the religious holiday but boy do we love Easter eggs, egg decorating and egg hunts. Lil and I like to prepare for holidays by reading legends and picture books. The four Easter books we found at our local library weave egg stories in a delightful way that would brighten any child's Easter basket.

The oldest Easter egg book we discovered this year was The Easter Rabbit's Parade by Lois Lenski. An Ohio writer who lived from 1893-1974, Lenski wrote lengthy, straight forward stories tied to a specific time and place. The Easter Rabbit's Parade tells of the farm animals kept by a young girl named Eliza. The livestock work together to make an Easter celebration for Eliza including eggs laid by Little Brown Hen and painted by Easter Rabbit and family.

Something new is the picture book Kiki. Author Christoph Schuler and illustrator Rahel Nicole Eisenring give life to a chick who is wise beyond her day-old age. Kiki observes that fighting hens are allowing thieves to steal their eggs. They will not stop arguing, so Kiki comes up with a clever solution to save and better the eggs.

For borrowed, Lil picked up Peter Rabbit's Happy Easter. I'm not sure how author Grace Maccarone and illustrator David McPhail got away with using the beloved character Peter Rabbit, but their book is charming. Peter characteristically makes a bad decision to steal eggs but ends up returning them, painted in bright and beautiful colors.

The odd blue-green cover of The Egg Tree caught my eye on the library shelf. A Caldecott Medal winner, Katherine Milhous' story sheds light on the Pennsylvania Dutch egg tree tradition illustrated with authentic drawing motifs and colors. A lengthy tale, The Egg Tree might inspire a new way to display decorated eggs at our house.

Do you have any favorite Easter egg books? Share in the comments!

PS. If you're searching for Easter gifts in Columbus this weekend, I have some suggestions on the City Folk's Farm Shop blog.

Love-ly Books {Book Hounds}

Valentine's Day is a moment to tell those we love how much they mean to us. Our family likes to get into the loving spirit by reading picture books. Our favorite stories have beautiful illustrations and themes about companionship and friendship.

Books say things that we sometimes can't put into words. They start conversations about devotion, gratitude, and acceptance.

Maybe it's just me, but I think an inscribed book is a truly romantic gift for a person of any age. Try one of our family favorites for the love of your life.

The Big Blue Spot by Peter Holwitz - One of the first books we bought for Lil, The Big Blue Spot tells a story of finding companionship in a simply illustrated, interactive book.

Plant a Kiss by Amy Krouse Rosenthal - A standout new book of this winter, Plant a Kiss explores a fantastical idea: if you planted a kiss, what would happen? If it grows, should you share it? The 'kiss' is illustrated by a textured glitter ribbon that sensory-seeking kids will love to touch on the page.

Valentine Surprise by Corinne Demas - This story follows a little girl as she struggles to make the perfect card for her mother. It shows that DIY projects can be frustrating in the making but ultimately rewarding.

The Valentine Bears by Eve Bunting, illustrated by Jan Brett - A hibernating bear surprises his mate in this seasonal story. Other than the anthropomorphising, the illustrations and text are true to nature in midwinter.

Sugar Cookies: Sweet Little Lessons on Love by Amy Krouse Rosenthal - Awarding-winning Rosenthal deserves inclusion twice in this list for Sugar Cookies. Soft illustrations of people and pets by Jane & Brooke Dyer accompany definitions of loving words like 'considerate', 'admire', and 'forgive' in the context of making a batch of sugar cookies.

What love-ly books do you recommend?

Holiday Books & Videos {Friday Five}

The homestead is bustling like an elf shop these days with gift wrapping, cooking, hosting gatherings and attending others. We like to read holiday books and watch videos during the down time to get excited for the big day coming. Here are five we like this year: 1) Hanukkah at Valley Forge by Stephen Krensky is based on the true story of George Washington learning about the holiday from a Jewish soldier in the Revolutionary war. I like the retelling of the Hanukkah story in this book as well as the connection to a historical character Lil already knows. Beautifully painted illustrations by Greg Harlin complete the book.

2) Every year during Hanukkah we listen to Matisyaku's Miracle. The youtube video linked is full of fun but funky imagery and the tune is remarkably catchy.

3) Did you know that The Killers produce a holiday song and video each year? 2011's The Cowboy' Christmas Ball is our favorite with a music video full of wild west characters.

4) Olive the Other Reindeer is a remake of the classic Rudolph tale by Vivian Walsh. The story of a dog finding her place in the world is illustrated by J. Otto Seibold's computer-created cartoons. When I can stomach Drew Barrymore's voice, we also enjoy the 45 minute video version.

5) The Muppet Family Christmas is a perennial favorite of our family. The 40 minute movie includes Muppet characters from Kermit to Fraggles to Sesame Street in a story about friendship. At various points in the show, they sing holiday carols and original Muppet songs.

What are your favorites?

Thanksgiving Reads {Book Hounds}

We love to prepare for holidays by reading books with Lil. Good Thanksgiving picture books are a little hard to come by because so many perpetuate myths about Native Americans. This year we are enjoying these food and family focused stories: An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott with illustrations by James Bernadin

A rural 19th century New Hampshire family is preparing for a harvest feast when the parents need to leave for an emergency. The older girls step in to try to finish the dinner with mixed results.

Thanksgiving Treat by Catherine Stock

Soft illustrations accompany this story of a young boy trying to contribute to his family meal.

Sometimes It's Turkey, Sometimes It's Feathers by Lorna Balian

When old Mrs. Gumm finds a speckled egg, she hatches it into a turkey. She raises the turkey in her garden, highlighting produce that ripens as the season goes by.

Do you have a favorite turkey day book to share?

NB: All links go to Amazon where these books are out of print but available used. Look them up at your local library - Columbus Public has copies of each.

Great Reads This Week {Friday Five} +1

1) Amy Turn Sharp's essay Teeth Never Die nibbled it's way into my head and required re-reading after Lil lost her first tooth this week. Amy's is no parenting prattle but a trip down a twisted memory lane. 2) In Op Ed: The Raw and the Deep-Fried, Bear of Slow Food Columbus elevates a New York Times op-ed about TV stars Tony Bourdain and Paula Dean to a call to action around the truth of the state of American cooking: we want to believe in the characters Bourdain and Dean portray but we do not want to cook well and cheaply.

3) Michael Procopio of Food for the Thoughtless connects vampires, self-image, and chicken with humor and a great recipe in his post Die, Vampire, Die.

4) I read the New York Times article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? on Sunday morning and have not stopped thinking about it since. The women in my family (Lil and myself included!) are prone to indecision and this article clues me in to why and how to live with it. Fascinating stuff.

5) Bloggers Without Borders launched this week with A Fund for Jennie, to benefit the Perillo family after the tragic death of Mike (who loved peanut butter pie). Bloggers Without Borders is a nonprofit agency that gives legitimacy and support to fund raisers and networking among bloggers in need.

BONUS 6) First Food is Real Food Justice popped into my reader just before the Friday Five roundout was scheduled to run. Civil Eats gets it right again with this post about how newborns in food deserts also lack in breastfeeding rates.

What great words did you read this week?

Homestead Heroines {Book Hounds}

Last month I devoured three accounts from fellow female real-food lovers. I read Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life, The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker and How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley. Each was part inspiration, part 'what not to do' and thoroughly enjoyable. Finley's How to Eat a Small Country is the tale of a family reconvening in a foreign land from the verge of dissolution. Amy, her husband, and two young children leave their home in the US for an extended stay in France. They live in a farm house owned by an adventurous couple and their children. The families slaughter animals and eat French delicacies together, enthralling and appalling the Americans. Through their travels, Amy and her husband relearn how to enjoy their marriage and family.

The Dirty Life tells how Kristin Kimball abruptly changes the direction of her life when she meets future husband Mark during a writing assignment. After a short period of dating, they move to a neglected new england country estate. Mark's passion for feeding others through hands-on, horse-drawn organic gardening slowly transforms the land and Kristin's habits into a viable whole foods community supported agriculture experience.

Alice Walker is an approachable but formidable writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize among other awards. In The Chicken Chronicles, she considers her flock of backyard chickens. The book's short essays convey Walker's complex values through seemingly simple conversations with her chickens. For part of the book she is writing to the chickens as she travels in India. A woman who misses her birds while visiting with the Dali Lama is a woman I can understand.

Walker's blog is a constant source of amazement. She is an activist with a gift for writing about her incredible experiences in an everyday accessible way. She is in Gaza right now and I am addicted to her updates.

Each read offers encouragement to urban homesteaders of both genders. The Chicken Chronicles is the quickest read and the most thought provoking. How to Eat a Small Country was a great warning sign to me: proceed with caution in the food media world. And The Dirty Life made me desire the farming life ever more.

What books have inspired you lately?

Added to Simple Lives Thursday 51.

A Conversation with Joan Dye Gussow

On Monday I had the pleasure of interviewing Joan Dye Gussow, keynote speaker for this weekend's Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association annual conference. A matriarch of the local food and organic movements, our discussion largely related to her most recent book, Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables. Rachel Tayse Baillieul: What does your garden look like now?

Joan Dye Gussow: I’m home and it’s under snow. It’s been under snow, pretty steadily, it feels like forever, but only about two months.

RTB: Have you seen the river with excess snow melt? Are you concerned about flooding? (Garden floods were a major character in the book Growing, Older.)

JDW: No, not now. Not since I changed. I rebuilt my garden up two feet when it was destroyed last year. I haven’t had any flooding since then. I’m higher than the land around me now so it will make a huge difference. I don’t expect to get flooded anymore.

RTB: What are your personal favorite things to grow?

JDW: People ask me that question and it depends on how things are doing at the moment. Right at the moment, I have a love affair with sweet potatoes because they are so productive and so reliable. They don’t seem to be subject to insects and diseases, at least that now how to get here. And because last year when I grew then I put them in a bed totally devoid of topsoil. It was literally this silt that baked into rocks when you aren’t looking.

I got 26 pounds of sweet potatoes and also the sweet potatoes managed to totally transform the soil. I’d never seen anything like it.

I’ve now been investigating to find out what it was. It turns out the root hairs recruit and collect organisms around them. They’re in a genus that secretes glue substances that hold the little soil particles together.

So here’s this crop that’s utterly reliable, beautiful when it’s growing, you can eat the leaves if you want, and it improves the soil!

RTB: About Growing Older, why did you decide to write this book at this time?

JDW: My husband of forty years died in 1997 and I always thought I had a very happy marriage. And two weeks after he died, I found myself skipping down the street. I was stunned that I didn’t miss him. That was totally unacceptable to people around me. It was very difficult to face and confront. When I began able to say things to people who were close to me, they said I had to write about it. No one says it, and I’m sure other people feel it, but nobody says it.

It took me a long time to sort it out. When I finally realized what it was, in a profound sense, I only had four chapters. I put the rest of it together from other things I had been writing.

One of the things my editor helped me realize that I wasn’t lonely when living alone was because I had so many relationships in the garden. She was definitely right. I had this on-going thing with the livestock that would invade my space and the bees and the butterflies, all of whom I sort of dealt with on a personal level.

The last section is called Growing Older, without a comma, because it’s about getting older. I felt that I really wanted to write about it. I am very healthy which I realize is a gift but I also believe that I am so healthy because I am happy as a person and I also am very active. I worked really really hard last year building the garden.

RTB: In the winter, I, and presumable you, are not doing as much of that outside work. How do you exercise when there is snow on the ground for what feels like forever?

JDW: That’s when I begin to say “I’m going to take up yoga or something else”. I have scolioses and didn’t want to go to an ordinary studio, but I did bring in someone for a few private lessons at home.

The truth is I do lose strength in my arms. I do have a two story house, and because I do forget things, you run up and you run down. I don’t think anything of running up and down stairs. It’s only my upper body that gets a little un-exercised in the winter.

The other secret of survival and age is to fight gravity because gravity really is the enemy. I discovered that last summer when I was working so hard and it was sometimes so hot. I would get up and work for four hours and eat breakfast and then lie flat for an hour. No pillows and I wasn’t sleeping, but like a yoga pose with hands turned up. Then I’d go out for another four hours, then come in and eat, and lie flat on my back again. It was amazing and made a huge difference to keep going.

RTB: You talk in the book about the despair that you and your students feel about environmental destruction and yet there’s some hopefulness too. How does that manifest itself in the face of news?

JDW: For me, at my age, I accepted the reality a long time ago. I write in the book about experiencing the moment that I believed what I was teaching and that was very shattering. I went through it, it was very difficult. And once you do it, there’s almost nothing more.

You can get down that the government releases genetically engineered alfalfa or Obama isn’t turning out to be what you hoped. It’s so careless with the planet that it astonishes me.

This all circles back to my sweet potatoes. I just learned from this farmer in the county that this collection of organisms that improve the soil was discovered in the nineties. You say ‘ oh my’, they’ve been doing this work down there all along, and we only discovered it twenty years ago? We’ve been pouring pesticides and herbicides on the soil and contaminating these things without any idea what we were doing to them? How dare we act as if they don’t matter?!

All you can do, in my view, is your best. What you have to do is live, try to live, as if the way you life makes a difference. Try to promote the ideas that you think, if they were followed, would make it possible for us to survive on earth. That’s the best you can do.

Phone interview condensed and edited.