Your favourite fiction books with simple living characters/themes?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 12 October 2011 in meta | 19 comments

I’m having a bit of a book week here on The Really Good Life – and on Recycle This too.

Following on from yesterday’s favourite non-fiction simple living books, I thought I’d do a run down of my favourite fiction books with simple living themes – either characters who live simple lives, or who grow or make or cook real food — but I can’t think of many. So instead, I’ll tell you the few I like and then I’m going to beg, on my knees beg, for your suggestions!

(I asked this question on UK Veg Gardeners nearly a year ago and most people suggested non-fiction-with-a-narrative books that are meant to be read curled up in an armchair in winter rather than a reference text — I do like those too but in this case, I’d prefer out and out fiction suggestions if possible.)

Ok, so here are my few:

• Drop City by TC Boyle – this one certainly won’t be for everyone as it’s half about hippies, with their free love & LSD, but the other half is about life in the Alaskan bush and it’s fascinating. I now have a collection of non-fiction books about life in Alaska to read whenever I finish Drop City because I don’t want to leave that world.
• Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag – I was hesitant to include this one because I didn’t love-love-love it but it was very interesting – the experiences of some Norwegian settlers “going West” in the 1870s and their subsequent hard life as homesteaders. Apparently it’s core reading on many high school or college syllabuses in the US but it’s pretty much unheard of in the UK.
• Various post-apocalyptic speculative fiction – my guilty genre fiction pleasure — you can keep your vampires and your spaceships, I like reading about our world coming to an end ;) It might seem odd to include it on this but when humanity is all but destroyed and there is no one to delivery take-out pizza or make new ipods, people quickly fall back to simple-style living. Even if the books don’t go into lots of explicit detail about it, it’s there – and I think it’s the bit that really fascinates me, and gets my cogs working in a “what if I was in that situation?” way. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham is one of my favourite books full stop and for this sort of thing – slowly rebuilding a farm for the group’s survival, and also a lot of discussion about how society should be rebuilt. The third part of Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes deals with global warming-like flooding. John Christopher’s The Death of Grass is mostly about a journey but one happening because of the … death of grass (so no wheat etc or grazing land for animals) – it makes me want to run out and grow potatoes!

…And that’s it, that’s all I can muster — so please, please, please have you got any suggestions I can add to my to-read pile? This winter might be another long, cold one so I need plenty of fireside entertainment :)

Charity shopping haul: books! books! books! and yarn

Posted by louisa on Monday 10 October 2011 in charity shopping | 3 comments

I seem to go through splurging fazes – spending a lot of money in one particular spending category each month. Last month it was clothes, the month before it was crafts and the month before that was eating-out/take-out food. This month, it’s looking like it’ll be books.

As I’ve said before, I love books but have bought surprisingly few for me this year – and I think that’s what inspired me to buy eight books in the first eight days of October! I think, for the sake of our bookshelves & my purse, I shouldn’t keep up that rate all month!

Two were new & full price (a rarity for me), two were second-hand from Amazon and the other four were charity shop finds from Saturday. We had the good fortune of going to the charity shops in Shipley just a couple of days after someone with similar reading tastes to us had a clearout – the shelves were full of interesting non-fiction books, half of which we had and the other half spiked our interest.

I got:

“Waste” by Tristam Stuart, a book about innovative (but often long standing) solutions to food waste, a little guide to woodworking with some easy project how-tos (I have a big encyclopedia on the same topic but this looks more immediately practical) and for fun, since I’ve been reading a lot of factual stuff lately, “World War Z” by Max Brooks which was amusing filed in the non-fiction section (it’s presented as a non-fiction oral history but is about the Zombie War, which, you know, hasn’t happen [yet]. I spent yesterday afternoon reading it and so far, would definitely recommend it to post-apocalyptica fiction fans). The books are all in really good condition but the charity’s “please give this back when you’re done” stickers were really annoyingly sticky and I’ve dented the front of “Waste” and “World War Z” by trying to peel them off. Grr.

At another shop, I picked up a little book about growing fruit:

I have a couple of dedicated books about vegetables but none about fruit, just the odd reference in more general books. This one isn’t the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever but has already answered a couple of questions I had about soft fruit bushes, so I think it’ll be well worth 50p.

I also made two craft purchases while I was out:

1000g of navy Guernsey, 100% wool yarn for £5. Not sure what I’ll use it for yet but it’s such a novelty to find enough wool for an entire project in a charity shop – and at such a bargain price too. According to the British Breeds website, their 5-ply usually retails at £5.50 per 100g ball!

I also took a chance on a squished-but-otherwise-brand-new “funky cord kit” – essentially two foam circles and some cotton threads designed for making friendship bracelets and the like.

It’s a kids’ kit but I’m a big kid who like playing about with thread so I’ll have fun trying it for 20p :)

Have you been charity/thrift/op shopping recently? If so, any good finds?

October mini-goals

Posted by louisa on Monday 3 October 2011 in goals | 2 comments

After meh-ness and illness in September, I’m keen to get achieving again in October. I’m thinking of even having a proper scheduled week off work too – it’ll be my first full proper non-ill week off since last October and like I did last year, I’ll hopefully tick some things off my annual goal list before it’s too late!

• 1. Design & make a (wooden) laundry hamper to fit the exact space available in the bedroom
• 2. Make a cushion for the new shoe bench in the porch (broken into sub-parts so I can tick off as I go!)
  1. measure & buy foam to size or research & source a filling alternative
  2. source fabric
  3. put together into a cushion
• 3. Do the final-final-final snagging in the bathroom. It’s about two hours work but I can’t get motivated to do it. We started renovating the bathroom on the last day of February. I think it’s about time it was finished once and for all!
• 4. Get my company accounts & personal tax stuff for 2010-2011 finalised, signed off and paid. (This is mostly a work thing but on here because a. I really need to do them so I can pay the tax before the start of January deadline & avoid a fine and b. we want to change our mortgage on our house before the end of the year too, which should save us a lot of money in the long run.)
• 5. Batch cook at least two (x two servings) meals for the freezer — and John will probably make the same amount. We rather depleted our homemade ready meals supply while I was ill so it’ll be good to build it back up again.

And not exactly a simple living goal but something John & I are doing:

• 6. Draw a self-portrait, and a portrait of the other person, every day.

Do you have any mini goals for this month?

My kindling cutting “helpers”

Posted by louisa on Sunday 2 October 2011 in chickens, wood stuff | 3 comments

I had some company while cutting the kindling this morning.

Lily was taste-testing each stick as it came off the axe.

“Mmm, bit of a woody flavour.”

And a few minutes later, after Lily had gone into a sulk because she’d heard the fake camera click of my phone (she HATES all cameras for some reason), Lime the chicken came to see what was going on too — the first time she, or any of the chickens, have visited the top level of the garden, which is three flights of stairs away from the chicken coop/run.

She watched me chopping some kindling for a bit but she was more interested in John cutting wood in the woodstore though and spent ages stood behind him, head cocked to one side and making the occasional clucking noise, as he sawed up some logs. She seemed to have no interest in any of the many edibles on that level, just wondering what us crazy humans were up to. :)

(Appalling camera phone pics, sorry for the quality.)

September 2011 – month in review

Posted by louisa on Friday 30 September 2011 in goals, less than 12 clothes challenge, meta | 7 comments

Wow, this month really flu flew by.

Goals in 2011 progress

Sigh, too ill to do anything much. Still a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time!

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

I’ve bought LOTS of clothes this month! Partly inspired by replacements – a favourite (work) top & a (newly holey) pair of jeans had to be decommissioned from general service this month – and partly by the start of term & change of the season. I bought a pair of jeans (excellent second-hand quality from eBay), two long sleeved cotton tops (new) and two t-shirts (new). I also bought a new pair of trainers as my last pair developed a 2inch split along the sole – fixable for dry weather wearing but not for the incoming soggy winter.

Before this month, I’d bought three things, so now I’m up to nine items in 2011. A few months ago – when I had bought anything for more than six months, I’d have been surprised at that. While I didn’t NEED these things, my existing clothes (which generally pre-date the start of the challenge by at least six-months/a year) are wearing out.

Growing & Chickens

Actually, make that nine edible things

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 27 September 2011 in chickens, growing | 6 comments

After writing the last post about all the edible stuff still in the garden, I let the chickens out for a play in the garden in the sunshine.

I now no longer have any swiss chard.

I better get some bloomin’ great eggs tomorrow.

Flu and what-have-you

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 27 September 2011 in growing | 3 comments

So I got myself all stoked up to do stuff and blog about it to get myself back into the swing of things then I got the flu. The only thing that’s been productive around here in the last two weeks or so has been my phlegmy chest. I’m still not running at full steam but I thought I should try to hop back aboard the blogging train before all the carriages race away from me and this metaphor goes off the completely off the tracks ;)

These last few weeks have mostly been spent slumped on one sofa or another, watching a whole lot of films and eating a whole lot of soup. But in my slightly-better moments, I’ve done some sewing after getting a new embroidery book out of the library just before the virus hit (book review coming soon) and wandered down to see the chickens, lamenting about the sorry state of the garden and wondering if things will fruit/ripen before the frost hits.

The latter put me in a bit of a “I’m a bad gardener” slump until I realised that even with all the dead things, the things that won’t quite get there this year, the things that didn’t stand a chance and the lack of any summer sowing whatsoever, we’ve still got at least ten edible things growing in the garden that we can/will eat: achocha (outdoor – will pick soon), tomatoes (greenhouse & outdoor), courgettes, marrows (ok, so they’re essentially the same thing but we used them differently), cucumbers, peppers, chillis (all greenhouse), leeks, pumpkin and swiss chard.

And that’s before we get onto the wild greens/fruit (predominantly nettles but there are also some bullet-like blackberries at the end of the garden and the dregs of elderberries on the trees near the kitchen), the technically-edible-but-I-probably-won’t-eat-them-now things (like the new leaves/shoots on the squashes & the achocha, or the marigold leaves & heads) and herbs (rosemary, lavender & mint still going strong outside, basil & chives inside, and things gone to seed both outside & in that are still usable just not as good as before they flowered, like dill & oregano).

And it’s also not including eggs – the six girls are still kicking out on average five a day, which is nice.

When I’ve got a bit more energy/less mucus, I’ll write more about our growing year here – lots more lessons learnt and things to definitely not do next year – but this has made me feel a little better about things, that there have been some successes as well as the many failures.

What’s still on the go in your garden?