FAN CLUB: Books over 500 pages
bigdogstwo
8 years ago
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msmeow
8 years agofriedag
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Idyll Book Club-Second Nature, A Gardeners Education
Comments (25)Does anyone else find this book hard to read? While the first chapter or two held my interest. I found that he digresses a bit to much for my taste. I like more of a story line. Maybe my problem was sticking with it. Not usually a problem for me. The type in my copy is small and hard for me to read for long. My eyes get tired, so I have trouble picking it up again. I will finish it but may not keep up with you all. Except for a couple of short peroids while I was growing up, we have always lived in rural areas. The yards never amounted to much. Maybe a few shrubs and fruit trees. A vegetable garden most of the time due to necessity. My paternal grandmother lived with us from the time I was nine and she did the gardening, and picked wild blackeberries for perserves and pies. My dad was an over the road trucker and wasn't home much. My mother was leagally blind and though she tried to have a few flowers it didn't amount to much. I did have to help in the vegie garden and a couple of my uncles had a large scale strawberry patch that a couple of my cousins, myself and a friend were payed a small sum for helping to weed and pick. We always managed to have a little fun there. I didn't do much with the yard in our first house. To busy with three little ones. Once we moved to the place before this one and all the kids were in school I started with a small vegie garden and strawberry patch. We always had horses around so had plenty of good fertilizer. There was a steep bank in front of the house that I worked with over the years. Strawberries did well there then I started adding the flowers. Mostly simple annuals at first and then started adding perennials. The neighbors always commented on how nice it looked and how much time I spent out there.LOL. As that area started to develope to the point it wasn't safe to ride the horses there. We longed for more privacy and space. We certainly lucked into finding this place. Fifty two acres mostly wooded. About eighteen acres of pasture, but that is down a steep hill and across one of the creeks. It was hard to even pick a spot to build the house since everything was pretty overgrown. I finally looked for a spot with the biggest trees nearby. The property had been logged and there weren't a lot of big trees. But I found and area that did have and is near the center of the property. Cedars were abundant, but so were dogwoods. Needless to say the earth is not good. A hard packed sandy clay. I have had to incorporate a lot of organic matter. Lucky for me their is an large animal humane society nearby. Lots of bedding and manure. Anyway I have managed to have a vegetable garden and several flower beds. The vegetable garden keeps shrinking. But lo and behold DH was browsing a garden catalog the other day and says he is ready to plant more things. I doubt that it will happen this year but as soon as he retires more power to him. He can sit out there and keep the squirrels from carrying off all the tomatoes. Heck they don't even carry them off. They just take a bite out of them and drop them. grrrr Yes the woods will readily encroach on everything you clear if it gets half a chance. There are several old foundations of log houses on the property. One had a rock walled cellar. There is even a tree growing in that. The whole area is overgrown with vinca. Very pretty in spring when in bloom but quite invasive. I mow paths through it and around it trying to keep it contained. The creeks had no crossings when we bought the property. Luckily DH had access to heavy equipment. He had to redo the crossings many times as the power of nature took them out with heavy rains. He has widen them enough now that they can carry most of the water without to much damage. But its one of the first things I go check after heavy rains. Well I didn't mean to write a book. I am going to make an effort to read a couple more chapters of this one. I know there is some good stories in there yet. Norma...See Morebook club selections
Comments (22)Oh--my group also does the "must be available in paperback" rule although I think we've kind of relaxed that one as long as the library system carries the book. We also take turns in that the dozen or so of us hold a planning meeting at which we all bring several books, each member proposes their books, we vote on our favorite, assign the member a month in which they are responsible for preparing and leading the discussion for their book and end up having a schedule at least a year long. I think our "division of labor" as well as the variety of books chosen has served to keep our club together for five years--well, that and the fact that we meet in restaurants and really relax and enjoy ourselves, too. Who chooses the restaurant? The member whose turn it is to lead the discussion, of course....See MoreSpeaking of Book Clubs...
Comments (35)Well, I'm in my book club primarily for the socializing! I would read books anyway. I enjoy the social aspect of discussing books with others, and I really like the women in my group. I realized one day that while I had garden friends, and sewing friends, and friends I used to work with, I knew almost no one who lived the same town as me, despite having lived there for 18 years. I knew that the mother of one of my daughter's friends was in a book club, and asked her if they were taking new members. The rest is history, and I'm having a whale of a time. I'm even reading books I'd otherwise never have encountered on my own. Some I like, some I do not, but it does expand my horizons....See MoreThe Plusses and Minuses of the Book Club Book
Comments (14)I belong to 2 book groups. We do not read "currently popular" books; how curious that one would think that would be a de facto requirement of a book group! Each of the groups I belong to has a different but democratic procedure in place for choosing books. We read plays, poetry, short stories, classics, new titles, fiction, non-fiction, etc. We have very rarely ended up reading a book that has qualified as "chick lit" (whether "currently popular" or not), and when we do, I don't mince words about how I feel about it. The point of the group is to have a vigorous discussion about the merits of a book, its relationship to the body of literature, to history, about translations (if applicable), to our other readings, etc. I have only once set aside a book and did not finish reading it, finding it lightweight, poorly written, and manipulative--and I did say so....See Moremsmeow
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