From Our Bookshelf: ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE by Barbara Kingsolver

The cornerstone of any education - which is absolutely what we're out to get up here on our hill in Lyle - is reading. As we planned our escape from the city and city ways, there was a collection of books that helped give us direction, as there will be even more in the future to help us navigate our endeavors. So from time to time, we thought we'd share some of these books with you - some inspirational, some practical - because the best thing about getting an education is sharing what you've learned.

There were lots of books we could have started with, but the one that most comes to mind is the nonfiction work Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible). Subtitled A Year of Food Life, the book traces the first year Kingsolver and her family - a husband and two daughters - abandon the industrial food complex and settle on a farm in rural Virginia with one objective and one objective only in mind: eat for an entire year nothing but locally-sourced food, including whatever they could grow or otherwise harvest. In addition to being a humorous, anecdotal narrative about what happens when you put a bunch of highly-educated city slickers on a working farm, Kingsolver's book also provides many practical lessons on farming, raising chickens, preparing and preserving the things you grow, and even serves as an easily-read treatise on the importance of self-sustainability, the trouble with our food system as it stands, and the dangers we face as individuals and a civilization if the latter isn't tempered by the former. Not at all preachy, AVM is instead a polite argument by example for a return to a more agrarian method of food production. There are certainly more scientific books you can read on the subject, Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma one of the best among them, but the appeal of Kingsolver's work is the conversational and as-mentioned anecdotal feel she develops. She's not lecturing us, she's letting us in on the secrets of her family's sustainability, presenting them in a way that makes them easily adaptable to our own lives, no matter what degree of locavore we're striving to be.

Sometimes you have ideas without words, vague sentiments that float formless within you until something or someone comes along and gives them those words and yanks them from the vague, plants them in the actual, in the process showing you how to bring your ideas to life. For us, Ms. Kingsolver's book was one of those impetuses. If you like reading us, chances are you'll love reading her.