October 2018 : Old MacDonald Finally Has A Farm

Let me first say sorry for the delay in posting the topic for October. Thank you to everyone for your patience.

Now on to Old MacDonald's long awaited farm! Our topic for October will cover fiction or nonfiction dealing with life on the farm or in farm or ranch
communities sometime in the past.

Here are a few suggestions. When you start digging, you'll find quite a few books out there.

Grownup Books:
A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
All Creatures Great and Small - James Herriot
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
Pigs Have Wings - P. G. Wodehouse
Shoeless Joe - W. P. Kinsella

Children's Books:
Charlotte's Web - E. B. White
A Day No Pigs Would Die - Robert Newton Peck
The First Four Years - Laura Ingalls Wilder

I'm looking forward to our plentiful book harvest for the month.

Think I'll settle down, at least for a starter, to The Mill on the Floss. I've been wanting to do some more Eliot (I read Silas Marner a half-century ago in high school and did Adam Bede a few years ago) and this will be a good chance. I'll be using the Norton Critical Edition.

Or maybe I'll start with Middlemarch instead. I've also got that in NCE, and either one will qualify as a ROOT.

I am going to be reading A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich, this is a book that I have had on my Kindle for quite some time so I am looking forward to clearing it.

Ok, a few options for me (need to see what my library has available):

See You in a Hundred Years / Logan Ward
The Tie That Binds / Kent Haruf
Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl / Susan McCorkindale

Oops! Forgot what group I was in! LOL! I usually try to find ones that are also historical, so need to double check these or look for others...

ETA: "See You in a Hundred Years" and "The Tie That Binds" are both tagged history. My library has both, but "See You in a Hundred Years" seems better, I think.

What a great topic! I have re-read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books this year except the last one, Those Happy Golden Years. I will read that one and have that series read! I usually read this series about every 20 years. Probably won't be around for the next read!;)

>1 cbfiske: Let me first say sorry for the delay in posting the topic for October. Thank you to everyone for your patience.

I'm doing November, and haven't posted mine yet, either. Haven't even though about it, yet! I guess I'm so used to the CATs in the challenge group being posted only a couple of weeks before the month when it applies!

Everyone knows what the theme is (science), so I may or may not get it posted much earlier than that. LOL!

I finished a western about two brothers driving a herd of mustangs to a horsebreeder who then get embroiled in murders happening on the ranch: Zwei Männer aus Texas.

I had read A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich many years ago and absolutely loved it. It is still a very heartwarming story but I wasn't quite as enamoured with it as I was in the past. Although the author paints a vivid picture of homesteading, I thought the main character was a little too self-sacrificing, giving up all her dreams to her husband and then to her children. I think as a young reader I accepted that a mother would give up all her hopes and dreams for her children as the natural course of things but now as a woman, I wish she had been a little more willing to please herself instead of always bending to the will of others.

Hi, I'm Dee, and I've just joined the group. I'm reading a book at the moment called The Adventurers by William Stuart Long. It's the story of the beginnings of the settling of Australia. This is the fifth book, in a series of twelve, and it involves beef, and sheep farming, plus the growing of crops, and orchards. So I hope that it counts.

>10 seascape: I read the first one of this series, but haven't gotten any further with it yet. How have you liked the continuing books? Do you intend to keep going with the series?

Welcome to the group, Dee.

>10 seascape: Welcome, Dee. Your book absolutely counts. Looking forward to hearing what you think of it.

Thanks Birgit and Judy for your reports. Looking forward to hearing what's going on down on the farm for others too. I'm spending the month rereading All Creatures Great and Small. It happens to be one of my favorites and I'm truly enjoying looking in on the Yorkshire farms once again with veterinarian James Herriot.

>14 cbfiske: I got mixed up with the months which is why I read my western quite early. I'm currently reading a book borrowed from my sister about a woman taking up gardening in Berlin who gets fascinated by all the wildlife living there, birds especially. Would this count?

>14 cbfiske: I went to college with James Herriot's granddaughter!

>15 MissWatson: Yes, Birgit. We will treat the garden in Berlin like the woman's city farm. I like the interaction with wildlife, even in the middle of a big city. To me, the western book you read also counts for this topic, as there is action that takes place on a ranch.

>16 Tess_W: That's something. Would have loved to meet someone from James Herriot's family. James Herriot always seemed to me like someone you could sit down and have a good chat with.

>9 DeltaQueen50: I never read any Bess Streeter Aldrich and always wanted to. You've tempted me. It's always an adventure going back reading books you've read before. Different things jump out at you. The question of how self-sacrificing a mother should be is a very interesting one. How much sacrifice is too much? Is there a point where the sacrifices need to be shared among family members? Interesting, interesting.

This is the fifth book in the series, and I own all but the last book. They have been quite hard to find, but I intend going on with reading them. I’m really enjoying the history within the fiction.

>15 MissWatson: Thanks, I'll add it to the wiki. Her husband desperately wanted her to grow potatoes, but it turned out the soil was unsuitable. And the birds ate all her raspberries. It gave me an idea what a hazardous thing gardening and farming actually is, so many critters are just waiting to pounce on your treasured plants.

I finished book #5 in the original Little House series, The First Four Years. This tells of the first four years of the married life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the establishment and destruction of two homesteads, one through fire and one through drought. Her daughter Rose is born during this time as was her son, who only lived a few months. There are still about another dozen books to read about prairie life. 145 pages 5 stars

See You in a Hundred Years / Logan Ward
4 stars

Logan and his wife, Heather, decided to leave their jobs and lives in New York City and take their 2-year old to Virginia to buy and live on a farm. Not only that, they were going to renovate the house to make it so that they would be living in the year 1900. They wanted to live this way for a full year.

I find these so interesting! There was a British tv show (which gave Logan and Heather the idea) called The 1900 House. Not long after, in Canada, there was a tv show called Pioneer Quest that took two couples and did pretty much what Logan and Heather did, except they went back a few years earlier to the 1880s, and they had to build their homes from scratch.

That being said, I found this really interesting. At the same time, considering the tv I’ve seen with similar topics, I wasn’t surprised at how difficult it was, as well as a huge reliance on (unpredictable) Mother Nature. It was nice to see the community and neighbours come together to help them out. The only thing is that I would have liked more in the epilogue – how much of hat they did/learned during that year did they continue with when they returned to the current day?

One Man's Meat by E.B. White, creator of Stuart Little and co-author (with William Strunk) of The Elements of Style. Excellent collection of essays, primarily in Harpers and a couple or three from The New Yorker, from the immediate pre-war and early WW2 era (July 1938 through January 1942). White's life as a salt water farmer – actually and more precisely, as a "gentleman farmer" – in Maine, but with substantial digressions to nearly everything under the sun, including White's "world federalism" and his sometimes conflicting thoughts on the New Deal.

ETA: This had the additional advantage of letting me get through yet another from my fairly extensive collection of "Maine books."

I have also finished La Mare au diable which offers a very romanticised version of a farmer's life in the Berry in the mid-1850s.

>24 CurrerBell: Love EB White! here is new york is splendid, even tho it was written in 1949, his essays evoke the time and place perfectly. Up in the old oak tree He also of course wrote Charlottes Web which could count for this theme!

I loved Charlotte's Web when I was young. Another one to pick up again and reread.
This month, as I said, I spent rereading All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. This is one I just love. The author talks of his years as a newly qualified veterinarian in Yorkshire in the 1930's. His love for the cows, pigs, horses, cats and dogs in his practice shines through. We also witness his growing appreciation and love for the Yorkshire area and the people he comes to know. You feel like you are there with him, maybe listening to his stories in an area pub at the end of the day. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always entertaining. Especially recommended for animal lovers.
Thanks to everyone for your readings this month. I have quite a few to add to my to be read list.
I will finish the month with my yearly rereading of Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Strange things seem to be going on in this early American farm community of Tarrytown. Wonder if the local schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, knows anything? Hmm. Well, anyway, Happy Halloween to all and good harvest out there on the farms.

Salt of the Earth: The story of the homesteaders in Western Canada was a history of the early farmers in the prairie provinces. There were quite a few photos and short write-ups about various subjects relating to homesteading.

My Bess Streeter Aldrich (ILL) didn't arrive in time. So I read Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden because it had a 'farm' tag. It didn't turn out to be very farm-like, more estate-like, but gardens were much discussed, so that's going to have to be my entry.