Thoughts? Opinions? Comments? :)
Anyone read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle?
Hi Pam. No, I haven't read it and wouldn't have known she has a new book out, but for this thread. I love her books and am anxious to hear what people think of this one. Thanks for bringing this one to mind! Happy New Year!
Louise
I am going to have to get it too, I am a Kingsolver fan! Did you all read Prodigal Summer??
No, that's the one prose book of hers I haven't yet read. Did you like it?
I think I read PS. Is that the one with the woman on the mtn.? If, so it took me a bit to get into it, but then I couldn't put it down.
I am terrible about remembering authors and titles. Sorry.
I know that I haven't read the one you mentioned, Pam. Is it good?
Haven't read it.
AVM is nonfiction and describes her family's experience in growing, buying, and eating almost all of their food locally. Here's a blurb from amazon:
"Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork."
Personally I liked it, although apparently it provoked some controversy among certain, um, conservative elements.
Yes, Jan23, that's the one! I think I read it in two nights, couldn't put it down and it is still one of my fav's. For those of you who love the essay/memoir type book, have any of you read Annie Dillard? I think she is my favorite author. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, etc......
I'm a big Kingsolver fan, but this experience was so contrived. We have worked through much of her experience (though it took us over twenty years) and no book deals to become as realized. Right place right time?
Re: Annie Dillard, she's definitely one of the best writers today and not known or read nationally enough. I'm surprised she's known outside the South at all. She's currently acknowledged here as a great Southern American writer, a cultural icon and treasure if you are interested in American literature. Read her poetry as well.
Laurel