things i read

i love to read. it’s an obsession really. there isn’t much i won’t read ~ cereal boxes, labels, classics, cd cases, receipts but books are really where it’s at for me. i don’t read magazines much and as many of my friends know and abhor, i don’t read the paper. it just seems such a waste of resources and online reading is like kissing a television screen, why bother?

so i read lots of books, two or three a week. because i love them and as you are currently reading this, i’ll list a few of my very, very favorites to keep the list relatively short:

Garden Books for resource information:
Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times/ Steve Solomon
Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening/ Steve Solomon
Maritime Northwest Garden Guide/Seattle Tilth (if you live in the Pacific NW, you should own this book)
The Produce Bible/ Leanne Kitchen
Straight-Ahead Organic/ Ogden Shepard
Roots, Shoots, Buckets, and Boots/ Sharon Lovejoy (great for kids)
Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening/ Louise Riotte
Square Foot Gardening/ Mel Bartholomew
Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens/ Patricia Lanza
Any of the Rodale Organic Pest and Disease Control books

Gardening Books with Information and a Little Something Else:
Botany of Desire/ Michael Pollan
My Year of Meats/ Ruth Ozeki (novel)
Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey/ Holley Bishop
Botany for Gardeners/ Brian Capon
This Organic Life/ Joan Dye Gussow
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-mile Diet/ Alisa Smith and JB Mackinnon

Gardening and Ecological Books that Everyone Should Read (in my humble opinion)
Walden/ Henry David Thoreau
Silent Spring/ Rachel Carson
The Unsettling of America/ Wendall Berry
For the Health of the Land/ Aldo Leopold
Our Sustainable Table: Essays/ Edited by Robert Clark
Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food, and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture/ Dale Pfeiffer
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Food/ Gary Paul Nebhan
Desert Solitaire/ Edward Abbey
The Grapes of Wrath/ John Steinbeck (one of the greatest food politics book, EVER, although you have to really read the book, again my humble opinion)
Garbageland/ Elizabeth Royte
Blue Pastures/ Mary Oliver (poetry that makes you think about the world around you)

Books that are Great just because They’re Great
River Teeth/ David James Duncan
God Laughs and Plays/ David James Duncan
Postcards/ E. Annie Proulx
Accordian Crimes/ E. Annie Proulx
Cannery Row/ John Steinbeck (most anything by steinbeck really)
The Cherry Orchard/ Anton Chekhov (play)
Hamlet/ W. Shakespeare (play)
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale/ Chaucer (from Canterbury Tales)
Tumble Home/ Amy Hempel
Geek Love/ Katherine Dunn
Love Medicine/ Louise Erdrich

. . . and the list goes on and on, seriously. If you are a beginning gardener looking for a place to jump off from into the glorious and sometimes overwhelming world of vegetable gardening, concentrate on the first list. If you’re looking for a little more politics start going down the line. Each book is representative of about 10 or 15 others that are in the same vein but a different point of view. These are the most accessable and easiest to understand. Happy reading!