"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

Crescent Dragonwagon: Bean By Bean: A Cookbook: More than 200 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans...Even Sweet Beans!

Crescent Dragonwagon: The Cornbread Gospels

Crescent Dragonwagon: Passionate Vegetarian

Crescent Dragonwagon: Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook

Crescent Dragonwagon: Winter Holding Spring

Crescent Dragonwagon: Alligators and Others All Year Long : A Book of Months

Crescent Dragonwagon: Home Place

Crescent Dragonwagon: Alligators and Others All Year Long : A Book of Months

Crescent Dragonwagon: Alligator Arrived With Apples: A Potluck Alphabet Feast

Crescent Dragonwagon: Is This a Sack of Potatoes?

Crescent Dragonwagon: Annie Flies The Birthday Bike

Crescent Dragonwagon: Brass Button

Crescent Dragonwagon: Half a Moon and One Whole Star

CRESCENT DRAGONWAGON: TO TAKE A DARE By CRESCENT DRAGONWAGON 1982

George R. Stewart: Earth Abides

Uyen Nicole Duong: Daughters of the River Huong
A young South Vietnamese woman makes a choice that gets her family on one of the last flights out before the fall of Saigon. That choice and its repercussions, the memories of her country before and during the war, a mythological-ancestral relationship that travels back to her relative, a river girl who became a royal concubine, weave together, silken as the products of the silk worms her grandmother raises. An original and haunting novel. (****)

Jennifer Weiner: Then Came You: A Novel
Lightweight but compulsively readable, satisfying novel following the four life-stories of women involved in the birth of a surrogate baby girl: the egg donor, the surrogate, the over-40 mother-to-be, the step-daughter of that mother. I always admire writers who can loop lives and plots together so well, like this author or Maeve Binchy. (***)

Suzanne Selfors: Mad Love

Tivadar Soros: Masquerade: The Incredible True Story of How George Soros' Father Outsmarted the Gestapo

Henry Orenstein: I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds

Mischa Berlinski: Fieldwork: A Novel
A Dutch-American anthropologist ends up in a Thai jail, convicted of murder. From that plot point, a fantastic tale spins out which turns out to center on the Christian missionary family, the son of whom she (the anthropologist) killed. A little slow to start, this one got me hooked. (***)

James Lee Burke: Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux, No. 17)
Dave & Clete go to idyllic/not so idyllic Montana from formerly idyllic Louisiana for a fishing vacation on the property of a reclusive writer who has somehow befriended them (James Lee Burke divides his time between Montana and Louisiana). Naturally, Dave & Clete quickly encounter sociopaths, organized crime, predators, hypocrites, fabulously wealthy villains bent on despoiling the environment, and bad girls with hearts of gold. I usually adore Burke's Robicheaux, but for much of this the plot twists were too far out to be believable and the violence over the top. But he's such a dang good storyteller you can't help but stick with it. And by the end, I'd accepted the plot gyrations and complications, the bad guys able to self-redeem, the... yeah. Not Burke's best but if you like him, you'll enjoy it anyway. (***)

Jonathan Franzen: Freedom
Franzen digs, gouges really, below the surface of the people next door and down the street... their histories, marital discontents, fingers itching to hit the self-destruction buttons. In this case: what happened to those nice liberal home-restoring good parents, Walter and Patty? (****)

Alexander McCall Smith: Morality for Beautiful Girls No. 1 Publisher: Recorded Books; Unabridged edition
Small, close-up stories, gently and lovingly told, and gorgeously read aloud, set in Botswana. In this Ma Ramotsway's fiancee, Mr. J.L.B. Mataconi (I may have the spellings wrong, since I'm listening, not reading) suffers from depression, which requires an intervention by the head matron of the Orphan Farm, the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (which is struggling financially) moves to offices above the Speedy Motor Company, and Ma MaKutzi because manager of same while remaining an assistant detective. Then, there's the small boy raised by lions, and the sibling's spousal problems of the Government Man. It's hard not to be charmed. (***)

James Lee Burke: Pegasus Descending [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)
Nobody, but nobody, tells story as well through place as James Lee Burke. Not that sober alcoholic Vietnam vet detective Robicheaux isn't a fantastically complex, conflicted character, to say nothing of his colleagues like he kick-ass fuck-up Clete Purcell and his superior at the New Iberia Police Department, Helen Swalleau. But he gives voice to the bayou, the sugar cane fields and mills, the pollution, the edenic remembered past of rural Louisiana. You can smell and taste the beauty and the corruption. And this is the best Robicheaux mystery in years. (*****)

Mark Haddon: A Spot of Bother
An endearing novel of manners, contemporary in a Jane Austen-ish way, and quite different from Haddon's earlier work. She, an educated intellectual is getting married for the second time, to him, a working class good-fellow-well-met contractor. Her parents (the hypochondriac father, the mother who is having an affair) do not approve. Nor does the gay brother, whose boyfriend is, however, desperate to attend the wedding, to which Jacob, her son by her first marriage, wants to wear his Bob the Builder t-shirt. And so on. Lightweight, funny, but with an underlying poignancy, its charm hides its mastery. Multiple viewpoints, very well done. Reminds me of some early Robertson Davies, like Leaven of Malice. (****)

Ben Hewitt: The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food
Hewitt raises more questions and hypotheses than he answer... one has the sense that he was grappling with issues that were too large for him, and the subject of the book, the food-centric (sort of) hardscrabble town of Hardwick, Vermont. I got frustrated with his asides and a certain precious town that occasionally crept in, but I couldn't help but find it enthralling. He tries to make peace with the fact that environmentally sound, home gardening, and incremental agricultural semi-self-sufficiency may be elitist and nay not be economically sustainable. But that our present-day food system is also frighteningly fragile and unhealthful in any way, and simply would work unsubsidized: 1 single fast-food mega-ag calorie on the plate takes an average of ***95*** calories of fossil fuel to get from seed to plate. A gardener himself, Ben Hewitt writes: "The scale on which my family and I grow food is arguably inefficient, in terms of economics, efficiency, and land use. We don't utilize chemical fertilizers, synthetic weed and pest control, or genetically modified seed; these things could probably boost production in the short run, but then, we don't farm for the short run. "I can buy a fine potato from any number of local farmers, but (not) the May afternoon I spent w/ Penny in the garden, sticking our hands deep into the cool soil. I can buy a head of lettuce, but (not) the pleasure & pride of my boys returning from the garden w/ a basket of greens & saying 'We picked it ourselves, Papa.' " And, in this Monsanto-fast food-fake-food world... being willing and able to feed yourself, even partially is a true "Occupy" act. Hewitt quotes a farmer named Eliot Coleman: "Small farmers are the last bastion protecting society from corporate industry. When we feed ourselves, we become unconquerable." I wish this book had been better edited: someone needed to keep Hewitt more on track and focused, with fewer asides. He needed to be less anecdotal and more fact-based, or more anecdotal and... Well. Still very much worth a read. (***)

Barbara M. Walker: The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Classic Stories
(***)

Gabrielle Hamilton: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
The best memoir I've read in awhile; that it's of a chef, a woman chef (who struggles with that label, and resents having to) is almost beside the point. Hamilton follows one of the most difficult possible rules of memoir: tell the truth as you understand it, clearly and transparently, even if it doesn't make you look good. Her candor made me ache for her, and wince at the same time; she comes across as both unlikable and someone you can empathize with. She is precise and unsparing in her descriptions, whether of a rat-dung filled kitchen or being frosted by Ruth Reichl "for the seventh time" and she has the knack of following interior fright trains of thought right as they head into outer life junctions. An uneasy and excellent read. (*****)

Robin Mather: The Feast Nearby: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week)
When I saw the subtitle, I suspected I was going to love this book of "essays and recipes" and I did, the essays most of all. Piquant, wry, self-deprecating, thoughtful, and deeply interesting for those of us who really consider the sustainability of our actions and choices, Robin's voice is unique and vibrant. I just LOVE the way she combines big issues and small experiences, personal and global. Chapter 5, about her delighted adventures and observations as she raised some Golden Comet chicks, given to her by a kind neighbor, into adult chickenhood, is especially fine. Somehow, and I still don't know quite how she did it so gracefully, she transitioned into a discussion of one uber-non-local and much -loved product, coffee. Her discussion of terms like "farm gate" "fair trade" and "organic" are well-informed and thoughtful, her linking of her morning cup with her own travels and observations years back in Chiapas, are brilliant and poignant, her choices as a discriminating coffee drinker (to roast her own beans; to use only arabica) will delight any cook. An optimistic read, celebrating resilience, self-reliance, friends, neighbors, the passage of time and cycles in nature, and the power of a really good cookie to help you get by in hard times. (****)

Patricia Ryan Madson: Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

Jonathan Fields: Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance

Michael Port: Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling

Leonard S. Marcus: Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

Douglas Stone: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Chiho Saito: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Vol. 1: To Till
Trying to understand the graphic novel phenom, bc a fictional character of mine does. Loved Persepolis, but this leaves me cold. (*)

Elizabeth Lesser: Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Les McKeown: Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track--and Keeping It There
Came to me well-recommended but didn't work at all for me, either because I'm not part of a large organization or because his map of what makes for "predictable success" seems patently self-evident. Or both. (*)

Sarah Ban Breathnach: Peace and Plenty: Finding Your Path to Financial Serenity
I am stunned by the transparency with which Sarah Breathnach discusses one of the last taboos: willful ignorance about money, and the innumerable pitfalls, emotional as well as fiscal, into which it can lead one. And she discusses it from a variety of points of view, treating the reader as an intimate friend. Her own rags-to-riches-to-rags story, beautifully, wryly, humorously, painfully told, forms the centerpiece of this could-not-be-more-timely book. If you want to understand how how fiscal crisis, personal and societal, can happen; if you want to connect the dots between emotions and income and worth and understand how odious that connection can be; if you want to be cheered as you undertake your own clean-it-up journey, you couldn't do better. While somewhat practical (FICO scores, opening and organizing bills) it is even stronger in the thoughtful way it makes finances, and their handling, an act of spirit and integrity. Highly recommended. Yeah, it's a little woo-woo at times, and yeah, some of her juxtapositions are a little disjointed, and yeah, I don't buy her generalizations about men and women. But still. (****)

Larina Kase: Anxious 9 to 5: How to Beat Worry, Stop Second Guessing Yourself, And Work With Confidence
Because I believe anxiety to be inherent to the creative process (alas), always on the lookout to read what others say about it. Not much in this is original or new to me, or exactly relevant to what I do or teach, though might be extremely to useful to someone who works in an office and is just beginning to follow the gingerbread-crumb trail of self-awareness around uncomfortable feelings. BUT, as someone who works almost all the time (tho the border between work & play for me is sometimes very blurry), and is partnered to someone of similar bent, I did find the following ?s useful to ponder: 1) What makes you work so much? 2) What are you afraid would happen if you worked less? 3) How does anxiety slow you down? 4) What stress in your life leads you to work more? How does working more create more stress for you? Hmmmm... (**)