A few months ago, I started adding all my favorite books to Goodreads, an online book cataloging site. When I review books here I like to be able to link to something, anything besides Amaz*n, and I liked the idea of building an online collection of quality books to point readers toward. There’s a lot of books in the world, and honestly not all of them are worth the read, let alone the purchase price. Especially in the homesteading category I have found a number of books written as how-tos by people who’ve just started doing the stuff– a pet peeve of mine. I love to read an honestly written personal story about coming into The Life, but please don’t write a how-to until you’ve got at least 10 years under your belt.
At any rate, I myself love book recommendations and I thought you might as well. I tried out Librarything first, and I do like their less commercialized feel and higher quality book focus, but I’m sorry to say I found it a chore to navigate. Goodreads is certainly more geared to selling books, and particularly best seller types, but the site is smooth and a pleasure to use.
This link will take you to the Apron Stringz sustainable living bookshelf. This is my default category for everything that’s not a novel or a cookbook. You will see a list of more specific categories on the left hand side if you want to do some pointed browsing. The books are listed by order of my ranking, most of the 5-star books are ones that I own and feel are worth owning. Some of the 4-stars are worth owning too if you, like My Man and I, aspire to a whole room of your home devoted to books. The rest are worth the wait of an inter-library loan. With a few exceptions, I didn’t list books that I didn’t like.
In my dream world, I would have time to review all of those great books for you. Instead, I need to go wash the dishes. But I do want to just slip in a quick plug for my latest favorite, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball. I had seen this one around for awhile but been afraid that, despite the title, it would be one of those romantic depictions of overly precious country life. It is not. She is a fantastic, raw author with an almost unbelievable story. Uproarious, honest, riveting, wise and yes, dirty. I loved it.
Goodreads also has a ‘to read’ list, if you are ever wondering how in the world you might return some sugar to me, I love books…. Ahem.
Lastly, which best-ever books are missing from my list?
**Note that I do buy stuff from Amaz*n, much more often than I’d like to admit. My point in attempting not to link to them is not that you shouldn’t shop there, but that I can’t stand the idea of advertising for them.
calamity jane 
Leave a Reply to Arrowleaf Cancel reply