50 in '10: #5
Feb. 5th, 2010 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Title: Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Author: Michael Perry
Length: 350 pages
Picked this one up at the library after it was mentioned on one of the gardening/urban farm blogs I read. Of all the books I have read, this one came the closest to me returning it to the library unfinished. Fortunately, after that frustrated pause at page 22, the author's storytelling picked up. Unfortunately, the book fails at being much of a farming/gardening book, succeeds only marginally better at being a book on stepparenting, and probably would have been best off as one of those "I survived a dirt-poor childhood in a large family" type memoirs. Part of the problem, I think, is that the writer is a writer and thus self-conscious about writing about things. Storytellers generally fare better IMO than people who have precociously mentally tagged themselves with their career name and sell short stories and articles to magazines. Or maybe I've just had bad experiences with the breed thus far. In short, I learned nothing new from this book.
Verdict: Skip this one.
Author: Michael Perry
Length: 350 pages
Picked this one up at the library after it was mentioned on one of the gardening/urban farm blogs I read. Of all the books I have read, this one came the closest to me returning it to the library unfinished. Fortunately, after that frustrated pause at page 22, the author's storytelling picked up. Unfortunately, the book fails at being much of a farming/gardening book, succeeds only marginally better at being a book on stepparenting, and probably would have been best off as one of those "I survived a dirt-poor childhood in a large family" type memoirs. Part of the problem, I think, is that the writer is a writer and thus self-conscious about writing about things. Storytellers generally fare better IMO than people who have precociously mentally tagged themselves with their career name and sell short stories and articles to magazines. Or maybe I've just had bad experiences with the breed thus far. In short, I learned nothing new from this book.
Verdict: Skip this one.
