Many stars to this lovely, lovely book

 Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
by James Rebanks

So very very good. Sad--depressing--cheerful--optimistic--
But tempered with reality. How can you not see, living in a world we inhabit and keeping your eyes open to the world around?  But still, if we only can have more farmers like him, we'll be okay.

He wrote (and my apologies for stealing his summary, there's so very much stuff just as good that led up to this),

What will our descendants say of us, years from now? How will we be judged? Will they stand in the dust of a scorched and hostile world, surrounded by the ruins of all that exists today, and think that we, who could have saved the earth, were thoughtless vandals, too selfish or too stupid to turn back? Will the future know us as the generation that pushed everything too far, on whose watch the world began to fall apart, who had so little courage and wisdom that we turned away from our responsibilities? Or will our descendants lie in the cool green light of the oak trees we planted and be proud of us, the generation that pulled things back from the abyss, big enough to overlook our differences and work together, and wise enough to see that life was about more than shop-bought things, a generation that rose above itself to build a better and more just world?

This is our choice.

We are at a fork in the road.

A prudent gambler would not bet his house on our virtue, because the odds say we will fail. There are a million reasons to believe that we are not big enough, brave enough, or wise enough to do anything so grand and idealistic as stop the damage we are doing, We are choking to death on our own freedoms. The merest mention that we might buy less, or give anything up, and we squeal like pigs pushed away from the trough. The world of human beings is often ugly, selfish, and mean, and we are easily misled and divided. And yet, despite everything, I believe we, you and I, each in our own ways, can do the things that are necessary.

Yeah. Me too. I hope.

So promising; so disappointed

 A Billion Years: 

My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology
Mike Rinder

I rushed through this, just to get through it. It was interesting, of course, but not the kind of interesting I expected. There were so many people, places, and things; people, so many people...my eyes were reading the words but my brain was hearing...
    I met so-and-so. I was send to this place to do this job. Then moved to another jog. Then blah-di-blah.
I basically got bored.

If he'd written more deeply, more introspectively, and included a lot of what he was learning and reading and thinking, it could have been a great memoir. As it was, it was a good memoir, I guess. But so very shallow. Detailed...and shallow. How can that be?

Sorry to not enjoy it more. If it had been one-third as long, and skipped a lot of episodes, I would recommend it completed. But I had to skim a lot just to get to the end.

Page turner, edge-of-seat, scary, etc...

 Blood On the Tracks
by Barbara Nickless

I don't usually read thrillers, but I made an exception for this one because it was about a K-9 cop, actually a railroad K-9 cop who was also an ex-Marine haunted by the ghosts of her past. Probably not literal ghosts, although you have to wonder, sometimes.

It was very highly rated, and when I get done adding my own rating, it will be even higher. I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. Smashing characters, a whole lot of action and backstory and front-story and absorbing plot throughout. I
can't say enough good things about this.

And only one negative, maybe--it was a little too gory. But no more than it needed to be. Not a book to read late at night in a creaking house on a windy night.  Or anywhere that scary nutcase killers might lurk.  

Interesting...I've been known to ding an author for the gratuitous use of unnecessary violence, but I won't ding her. All of the gratuitous violence was necessary.

Wish I'd quit sooner on this one

 The Wise Women

It started out really good, but then became boring and tedious and repetitive. I thought I liked the characters--they certainly seemed likeable. It was the story that was dull to the max, which seemed impossible when you're writing about a woman with a difficult child and a husband who pretended to make the mortgage payments on their house but really just ploughed the money into a hopeless startup company. And a sister who has a girlfriend much younger than her who might be cheating. And a mother who butts in without good sense.

It just dragged, and when I tried to skim to the end, I found I didn't care how it ended.

Learned just enough to be alarmed, oops!

 The Warner Boys:
Our Family's Story of Autism and Hope

by Curt Warner

Sometimes a parent (or grandparent) just wants to hear someone else's story in order to believe that it will all work out in the end.  I'd like to say this is a good book for that--it was certainly why I chose it. (Plus, it was available at the library)

And it was a good book for telling one man's story of how he and his wife survived their twin boys growing up on a pretty severe range of the spectrum. But for me it was scary as heck. Their boys weren't mean or cruel, but they were very physical and pretty much lacked the self control you'd hope a kid would develop by age five or so. So they acted out against themselves and their surroundings so severely that the man and his wife pretty much walled themselves off in isolation for a lot of years.

You couldn't blame them, either--there wasn't a lot of help for kids like their in those days. But parts of the book were very scary.

I didn't come away with any tips or any information about what they did which helped or didn't help. Other than the diet thingy. The wife became convinced that some of their self-harm was an attempt to deal with stomach issues from a crappy diet, and she may have been right. But again, the book was very shy on specific details about stuff like that.  Or maybe I skimmed them, sorry.  Overall, it's probably not a waste of time to read it, but I wouldn't recommend it all that highly.

Real good to start the year. Lots of gore too.

 Blitz
The Cheque Files #3

Pretty much as greatly enjoyable as the previous two--and a long wait for it!  My only (and very slight quarrel) was that the author would go off into endless digressions a little too often and stay there a whole lot too long.  It's amusing stuff and always very imaginative, so I didn't skip any of it, but at times I wondered if and when any of this endless detail would fit its way back into the story...and mostly, it didn't.

But the battle scenes and other exciting parts more than made up for it. I'll happily read a fourth edition in the series--if it ever comes.

Mammoth Meanders to Toledo Bend, Day 6

Saturday 21 Jan 2023

And return

The park filled up with families and screaming children and dogs off leash overnight. Which is difficult to understand, because how can a camping loop that only had eleven spaces "fill up"?  I think there might have been one or two still empty, plus the campground host site which is clearly occupied but I have not seen a single person outside the trailer since we came.

So it wasn't a pleasant place to be yesterday, and I didn't really feel like being outside anyway. Molly had diarrhea again during the night. I took her out for a dump, but also in the morning she had a pile in her cage. I hope she's over this soon!

Oddly enough, today was the first one in several where i actually felt energy in my legs. I could walk! and not just trudge along, stopping to rest every five or six paces. Is the misery finally over?

Not a great morning and not a great drive. I failed to give adequate instructions about going into the Love's, and Ed had to make a dangerous U-turn. And then he got in such an all-fired hurry, going 85-plus in a 70 mph speed limit and whizzing past long lines of big trucks, that he missed his exit in Greenville entirely. I wasn't paying attention--I would have thought he could take a simple route he's taken hundreds of times before.

So blah. Anyway, we're back at this place where our house is.