1. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver
First up: the book that made the now ubiquitous farm-to-fork movement really take off. Kingsolver's classic bestseller from 2008 was an incredibly successful non-fiction project for this prolific fiction author. I didn’t know until I read it, though, that Kingsolver is pretty darn antagonistic toward every deeply-held belief I have: my Catholic faith, the structure of the Church, gender (that link is a doozy) patriotism, and basically everything else I stand for in life.
What do we have in common? We both like to eat vegetables.
What do we have in common? We both like to eat vegetables.
The closer I got to finishing her book, I started calling it Animal, Vegetable, Eye Roll because come on, the lady bashes on All Saints Day. All Saints Day! But whatever, Kingsolver is a master wordsmith, and her book is a one-year snapshot of the life of living off food she and her family either grew, or purchased within a 100-mile radius of their home in the Appalachian mountains. She’s a literary giant and the queen of writing accessibly and colloquially. Kingsolver writes fascinatingly about, literally, dirt. And slaughtering her home-grown turkeys. The book’s a classic, even if she’s quite a piece of work. Glad I read it, but won't be picking up The Poisonwood Bible anytime soon.
2. The Wideness of the Sea
2. The Wideness of the Sea
Katie Curtis
I follow Katie's New England life on Instagram and love seeing pictures of both her beautiful family life--including the recipes she creates for her foodie blog, the humble onion. This is dangerous. She regularly makes me seriously rethink giving up meat and dairy. Drool.
This beautiful little book alternates between New York City and a small coastal town in Maine. It follows a family and one daughter in particular after her mom, who was a successful and talented painter, dies of cancer, and the emotional ripples an event like that sends out for years in a family.
If it sounds like it might be a sad read, well, yes, parts of it are more bittersweet than merry. But as a whole, this book made me feel like I was on a vacation and this was the beachy yet soulful book I had taken along with me to read with my sand in the toes. Heartily recommend.
Trevor Lee Stewart
Do you have children? Do they have ears? Yes to both? READ THEM THIS BOOK.
It's a well-written, hilarious, triumphant gem that celebrates the ingenuity and value of children. We're reading it's sequel now which I'm finding a little dark, but this first one is pure gold and we've read it out loud, twice, by request of the boys.
Trent Horn
I loved getting to chat with Trent for an interview that aired on both Coffee & Donuts with John & Mary and the Morning Drive show. This scrappy little book on popular (yet either fake or inaccurate) quotes by Catholic saints is useful, relevant, concise, and most importantly, it's incredibly well-researched. The first quote that's debunked (quite thoroughly) in the book is the old trope trotted out in the name of St. Francis of Assisi to silence the more vocal supporters of the faith: Preach the Gospel, and if necessary, use words.
You know, because the New Testament is full of Jesus not preaching. Just opening doors for folks, and such.
G. K. Chesterton
Additional cheating: I have not finished this book, this 800-page book, which has type so small, a lady in my book club avowed that she physically could not read it--because the words are so tiny. ;) I've nearly finished the first set of stories the collection, dubbed "The Innocence of Father Brown." At "The Flying Stars" I nearly gave up--reading and grasping anachronistic cultural references isn't my strong point. But after pushing through the next two or three stories, I think I'm going to stick with it for a while. Uncannily insightful yet unassuming, Chesterton's humble crime-solving cleric was the literary answer to the question posed by the popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes: To brilliantly solve the crimes of the world's psychotic criminals, must one by a sociopath? Chesterton said no, of course not. And he's got 800 pages to prove as much.
That's my stack! Let me know if you've read of of these too, and what your thoughts are!
