Get the List here! 95 Books to read – recommended by the Fellowship of The Kitchen’s Garden Farmy Friends

 Morning darlinks! How do you like your new name? The Fellowship of the Kitchen’s Garden Farmy Friends. Try and say that; at speed, three times in a row,  after a few wines, with a glass in one hand and standing on the opposing  foot.

Here is the list of Books and Authors for you to save. Compiled by the ‘The Fellowship of The Farmy Friends’ -maybe that is easier .

You have given me a wonderful, comprehensive, eclectic pile of books to read.   Just the list itself is a gift of gold for this reader. And I am so grateful that I can present them all on one page for You, as thanks. 

I have just cut and pasted them in the order they were received. And any applicable comments are from the contributer.  I cannot make an easy to print thingy, so may I suggest you copy and paste into your own document and print from there.  I am definitely printing a bunch of these and giving them away as christmas surprises in the christmas cards!

Books we are going to love reading: here at thekitchensgarden.com

1. Hilary Mantel’s “Bring in the Bodies”
2. Wolf Hall
3. Hunger Games Trilogy
4. Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home.
5. When in Doubt, Add Butter by Beth Harbison
6. Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier; (Wonderful!!)
7. Sir Terry Pratchett
8. The Tiger’s Wife
9. I am currently listening to (long commute) In the Moon of Red Ponies by James Lee Burke. The writing has my stomach flipping as I listen.
10. James Less Burke is my husband’s very favorite author of all time. He just finished Creole Belle.
11. CS Lewis. The secret to good writing is telling the truth. I think that is Lewis’ brilliance.
12. Flannery O’Connor
13. The Snow Child: A Novel, by Eowyn Ivy (miss c notes that this was nominated by three readers!!)
14. George R R Martain’s Dance With Dragons
15. This is where I leave you” by Jonathan Tropper. Highly recommended–hilarious and poignant.
16. Bill Jones Jr. Our fellow blogger and camera gifter. His new collection of short stories Juice and Other Stories. Miss c looks forward to reading them soon.
17. George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series
18. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver.
19. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.
20. Barbara Kingsolver  The Lacuna
21. The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill,
22. ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ by Steve Toltz,
23. A Discovery of Witches’ by Deborah Harkness.
24. ‘The Whole Hog’ by Lyall Watson – some amazing tales and facts about Pigs!
25. The Poisonwood Bible remains one of my favorite works of fiction of all time.
26. The Shell Seekers by Rosamund Pilcher, if you like urban fantasy (I didn’t know I did until I read this series)
27. The Dresden Files is a must-read.
28. The Mists of Avalon
29. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
30. “Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister”, by Deborah Devonshire.
31. I’m a real fan of Graham Robb. Try “The Parisians” and ” The Discovery of France: a historical geography”.
32. Most essential, if you haven’t already read them, is the series of “Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell
33. Alice Munro
34. The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, by Mark Seal, so interesting and a true story.
35. City of Thieves by David Benioff.
36. The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum.
37. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.
38. Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger. The characters are so rich and I was so sad to get to the last page. I wanted it to continue forever.
39. A Painted House by John Grisham. It is not his usual legal/thriller fiction. It is about a young Arkansas boy whose family sharecrops in the 1950s.
40. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan
2. Anything by Connie Willis
3. I just re-read juvenile/adult fiction “Island of the Blue Dolphins.” If you read it years ago, I recommend it now as an adult. There are so many more historical implications.
4. I love the Milly Reynolds mysteries…the Mike Malone series. They’re delightful. They are quick reads, fully of British humor and understatement.
5. The Secret Life of Bees
6. The Game of Thrones
7. A Country Year by Sue Hubbell.
8. Sylvia’s Farm – the journal of an improbable shepherd. Fun and very well written.
9. Someone Know My Name by Lawrence Hill.
10. Runaway by Alice Munro.
11. Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, whose protagonist has Tourette’s syndrome.
12. Kate Moses’  -Wintering, a novel about the last three months of the life of Sylvia Plath.
13. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood — most anything by Atwood is good.
14. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (an old favourite & perfect for travelling because it’s long),
15. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
16. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
17. Also the free E-book classics via Kindle etc are fantastic.
18. New authors via Smashwords,
19. Cristian Mihai, Dianne F. Gray, Maggie Myklebust’s (Fly Away Home) and Lori Di Nardi who are WordPress bloggers with published e-books.
20. The Shoemakers Wife a true story and delightfully written.
21. “Madame Tussaud -a novel of the French Revolution” (she had a wax museum during that time period – you see all levels of society and how they were affected) by Michelle Moran
22. “The Last Place on Earth.”
23. Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy.
24. There’s also a series by Patrick Taylor that starts with “An Irish Country Doctor” .
25. I liked “Domina” – it’s about one of the first women in medical school.
26. Green City in the Sun” by  Goldsmith.
27. The Zoo Keepers Wife.
28. Pillars of the Earth.
29. World Without End and Fallen Giants .
30. The Shadow of the Wind.
31. The Kitchen Garden.
32. Kim (R. Kipling).
33. Thorn Birds.
34. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach; (Some parts are laugh-aloud and read-aloud funny…)
35. In the Woods, by Tana French; (very good murder mystery set in Scotland.)
36. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt; (Fascinating!)
37. Making Supper Safe: One Man’s Quest to Learn the Truth About Food Safety, by Ben Hewitt.
38.  The Town That Food Saved, by Ben. We met him at a conference and he’s an interesting young man. He has a good blog, too.)
39. The Bloodletter’s Daughter (A Novel of Old Bohemia) by Linda Lafferty. (I had never read anything about this region’s history, interesting.)
40. Wolf Hall

1. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
2. Garden Meditation – Cultivating Peace’ by Timothy McKibben (a monk I have studied with)
3. The Outlander by Gil Adamson
4. ‘Into the Land of Snows’ by Ellis Nelson, another blogger..
5. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye.
6. The Grass Harp by.Truman Capote, gentle funny, poignant.
7. The Holy Man by Susan Trott
8. . I thought of World Made By Hand when reading your NaNo excerpt, so thought that deserved a mention.
9. Irish writer – Kevin Barry at the moment. We’re reading his short story collection Dark Lies the Island.
10. I also highly recommend David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten which I have read several times.
11. For characters that are hard to part with, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats is hard to beat.
12.  Wilfred Thesiger’s wonderful travel book, Arabian Sand -a good old fashioned explorer’s tale with some really moving writing in it.
13. The Tiger by John Vaillant
14. The sound of a wild snail eating – Elisabeth Tova Bailey
15. Plainsong by Kent Haruf – set in the midwest – raw and brilliant. Cecilia loved this so much she begged the library lady to let her steal it.

Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org). It’s a website where you can download, for free, books for which the copyrights have expired.

Good morning. I packed and ordered and cleaned yesterday. But finished nothing.  I will lug my bag out to the barn this morning and weigh it. Get a fright, panic a bit, then resign myself to overweight. It is the presents. And I will not leave them behind. They are finds that I have collected over the last year or so, I would rather leave my clothes behind, but I need them to pack around the fragile gifts!!

Tonight we meet with the builders for a final consultation and I will give my little camera to the Kiwi Builder who is heading up that team. John will not be working while I am away so he is joining the team of minders of the Farmy and they have decided to do the whole day by themselves today.  Then John and I will do the weekend.  Then I am gone.

The Tall Teenager (Triple T as ChgJohn calls him) was given a camera for his birthday so I shall bribe him into taking a few shots of the animals for you and I, once in a while. Teenagers work for pizza!

Three more sleeps until I fly out to California for the first stop. Six nights before I climb aboard the plane for New Zealand.  We will not be back until Christmas day. Are your virtual bags packed yet? Ready to  come along as the Farm Weblog morphs into a Daily (mostly)Travel Blog with Food? Such fun we will have.

Soon I will stop being the headmistress and I will be the Mama again. Such a joyous sound.

Have a lovely day.

celi