My husband Kelly heard about The Audacity of Simplicity and passed news of it on to me. I didn’t want to wait till I had read it to get the word out about it…looks very timely and got good reviews. Here’s a bit about it:
Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter, by Lloyd Kahn, is a large paperback filled with two-page spreads of a wide variety of interesting homes from around the world. The earthbag-papercrete house that we built in Colorado is on pages 88 and 89, so of course I’m always pulling our copy out to show it to guests. And usually they starting browsing the pages.
I’m making the cover illustration really large so you can get a sense of the range of homes that Kahn discusses and illustrates:
I first bought the massive Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, over ten years ago. I kept it by my bedside for late-night reading because there was no pesky plot to keep me awake. I found it written in an enjoyable style, with lots of sections I wanted to read. I’ve cooked many recipes from it and several have become favorites. The title is a bit misleading: this is not just a book for people living in the country, as anyone interested in simple living will find a lot of interest in the book. Read the rest >>>
My husband Kelly has a massive website on all aspects of natural building, greenhomebuilding.com and a smaller one, earthbagbuilding.com. The other day I got curious what the most popular books on green home building were, so I downloaded the stats for four years of what had sold on Amazon through his sites. Here they are, in the order of popularity, and the links take you to Amazon. #25 is a major favorite of mine, and not just because our earthbag house is in it. I used to be a librarian and I do love doing book lists!
1.Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series)
2.The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book Read the rest >>>
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, by Elizabeth Lesser, is a book about how “suffering and crisis transform us, humble us, and bring out what matters most in life.” The quote is from a man in the book who was in a terrible accident and experienced much pain. It’s a very loving book, even as she tells heartbreaking stories of people coping with the loss of a child, their own illnesses, and more. Her own life is woven into the tales in a way that I really enjoyed, like getting to know someone.
I read it hoping for something that would help me come to terms with the rate of change in life, and the ways in which the environment is changing so fast: getting hotter in some places, getting so dry in so many parts of the American west that water for the future is a question mark.
It is said that leaner people do better than heavy ones in conditions of physical stress. They point out that the people who fast the longest are very lean, and that the body can do very well on a long-term diet of mostly raw foods in surprisingly small amounts. But someone who is overweight is used to consuming a lot of food on a regular basis. The physical effects of a change to a smaller quantity, simpler, mostly raw or natural food will often cause a “healing crisis” to occur.
