Here are 62 books that The Farmer's Age fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started to garden seriously when we had three young kids and little income. We had limited space and had to be ingenious about how and what we grew. A flock of chickens soon joined the effort, adding fresh eggs, compost-fueling manure, and plenty of entertainment. As we moved, we always had a garden, adding structures like sheds, trellises, tomato cages, fencing, and chicken coops. My work writing books and articles about backyard homesteading gave me the chance to meet resourceful people with expertise miles beyond my own. I always came away from those encounters loaded with new ideas to incorporate into next year’s garden.
I first got acquainted with John Seymour through the original version of this book, The Self-Sufficient Gardener. I was charmed by his earthy lore and practical tips – an author who truly knew his stuff. A plus was the beautiful illustrations in the book. Its new permutation, The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live Itwas been expanded to cover everything from micro-urban gardens to 5-acre homesteads. While gardening is the focus, the book includes plenty of information on butchering, brewing, canning—even spinning flax. What the book doesn’t include are plans and step-by-step photos for building structures, though it does include rudimentary information on metalworking and carpentry. Most importantly, Seymour has a lifetime of gardening and farming experience to draw upon. The reader reaps the benefit.
Embrace off-grid green living with a new edition of the bestselling classic guide to a more sustainable way of life from the father of self-sufficiency.
For over 40 years, John Seymour has inspired thousands to make more responsible, enriching, and eco-friendly choices with his advice on living sustainably. The Self-Sufficienct Life and How to Live It offers step-by-step instructions on everything from chopping trees to harnessing solar power; from growing fruit and vegetables, and preserving and pickling your harvest, to baking bread, brewing beer, and making cheese. Seymour shows you how to live off the land, running your own smallholding…
I started to garden seriously when we had three young kids and little income. We had limited space and had to be ingenious about how and what we grew. A flock of chickens soon joined the effort, adding fresh eggs, compost-fueling manure, and plenty of entertainment. As we moved, we always had a garden, adding structures like sheds, trellises, tomato cages, fencing, and chicken coops. My work writing books and articles about backyard homesteading gave me the chance to meet resourceful people with expertise miles beyond my own. I always came away from those encounters loaded with new ideas to incorporate into next year’s garden.
One November evening in 1831, Rebecca and John Burlend, three children in tow, stepped off a riverboat. Emigrants from England, they had reached Phillip’s Ferry, Illinois, the end of a dangerous journey. But instead of the village they expected, they found only forest. They burst into tears.
The couple eventually buys land and clears it by “girdling”—stripping bark so trees die and drop their leaves, letting in enough sun for growing crops. Those include “Indian” corn whose stalks support beans. Indoors, a rag strip in a dish of lard burns with enough light to sew by. But farm life is perilous: While harvesting, a pregnant Rebecca rests by a sheaf, from which a startled rattlesnake crawls out. She kills it with her rake.
I’ve read this book several times. It’s a saga worth relishing.
On a frosty day in November 1831, Rebecca Burlend and her husband, John, and their five children debarked at New Orleans after a long voyage from England. They took a steamboat up the Mississippi to St. Louis and from there went to the wilds of western Illinois. It was a whole new world for a family that had never been more than fifty miles from home in rural Yorkshire.
Rebecca's narrative, written with the help of her son, was first published in 1848 as a pamphlet for people of her own class in England who might be considering migration to…
I started to garden seriously when we had three young kids and little income. We had limited space and had to be ingenious about how and what we grew. A flock of chickens soon joined the effort, adding fresh eggs, compost-fueling manure, and plenty of entertainment. As we moved, we always had a garden, adding structures like sheds, trellises, tomato cages, fencing, and chicken coops. My work writing books and articles about backyard homesteading gave me the chance to meet resourceful people with expertise miles beyond my own. I always came away from those encounters loaded with new ideas to incorporate into next year’s garden.
I’m a sucker for any book about vanishing skills. Shopwork is loaded with such lore. For example, the section on harness repair reminds us “thread should be torn instead of cut, in order to give a long tapered end.” Why? The better to thread a needle. The “Ropework” chapter has detailed options for making splices and loop ends—and enough knots to challenge any sailor. How many books offer on steps on knife whetting or how to set the teeth of a crosscut saw?
This book can brighten a winter’s evening with things you can be glad have vanished, like spooning toxic white lead to mix paint or soldering with a gasoline-fueled blowtorch. Overall, it equips you to follow the maxim, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
I started to garden seriously when we had three young kids and little income. We had limited space and had to be ingenious about how and what we grew. A flock of chickens soon joined the effort, adding fresh eggs, compost-fueling manure, and plenty of entertainment. As we moved, we always had a garden, adding structures like sheds, trellises, tomato cages, fencing, and chicken coops. My work writing books and articles about backyard homesteading gave me the chance to meet resourceful people with expertise miles beyond my own. I always came away from those encounters loaded with new ideas to incorporate into next year’s garden.
Setting up and maintaining a backyard homestead is honest, fulfilling work. For those who prefer productive labor as exercise (rather than heading to a gym), this book is an inspiring look backward at satisfying, useful skills. Take Seymour’s wattle hurdle. Used as a herding panel, the hurdle is woven entirely from hazel sticks. Any supple wood will do. The result is a portable fence panel that cost nothing but a bit of labor.
Many of the projects featured are out of reach (like millstone dressing or coopering or charcoal burning) but all are fascinating and most still relevant today. For example, Seymour demonstrates that engineering a wooden gate that wouldn’t sag was worked out a long time ago—in several variations. Like all of Seymour’s books, this one is exquisitely illustrated.
Precise drawings and sketches and historical photographs enhance a detailed record of traditional crafts of Britain, Europe, and the United States and instructions in the skills involved
After hurricane Katrina, I was shocked by the scale of displacement and devastation, and the failed government response. I decided to use my planning classes at MIT to assist with rebuilding efforts. Over the next ten years, my students and I worked with several dozen organizations across New Orleans and provided ongoing assistance to three neighborhoods. Through this work and my relationships with many New Orleanians, I learned so much about the city and came to appreciate how special New Orleans, its way of life and people are.
New Orleans is a historic, intriguing, and complicated city.
So many forces have shaped its settlement, development, culture, and character.
Pierce Lewis helped me understand how New Orleans’s location and geography brought it into being and influenced how it has grown, along with how different immigrants and the blending of their cultures have shaped the city.
He traces how the city’s economy has evolved in relationship to national economic trends and local political decisions on where and how to invest. The book is full of maps, photos, and images that enhance and illustrate the narrative and is written in an engaging style.
It ends with a clear-headed perspective on the problems faced by New Orleans at the turn of the 21st century.
In his now classic work of historical geography, published in 1976, Lewis traces the rise and expansion of New Orleans through four major historic periods. This revised and greatly expanded second edition brings that story up-to-date, illustrating how the city continues to overcome its site on the Mississippi Delta - ""a fearsome place, difficult enough for building houses, lunacy for wharves and skyscrapers.
Growing up in the nineties I was a Buffy fan, although that is probably understating things. I have all the Buffy novels, which I read over when waiting for the next series to come out (this was in the days before Netflix!). For me, Buffy had the exact right mix of humour, horror, and deeper complexity, dealing with issues that really impacted me, but in a way that made them accessible. I loved the characters, I loved Buffy herself, I loved her strength and humanity. When I decided to write Raising Hell, I was influenced by Buffy, but there are differences – Ivy is no chosen one, she chose herself.
With an awesome nineties vibe that took me right back to my own teen years, Mina and the Undead is about a British teen girl battling vampires (obviously) in New Orleans. A great Gothic horror written by a fantastic new British writer, filled with gore and references to 90’s pop culture. A ton of fun!
'A dark and thrilling tale of the paranormal. With haunted houses, family secrets and murder galore, this delicious and gruesome tale of the macabre will ignite a whole new generation of vampire fans.' Lauren James
'Brimful of nostalgia and cinematic atmosphere. A thrilling read and a clever new twist on the vampire stories you love.' Laura Wood
New Orleans Fang Fest, 1995. Mina's having a summer to die for.
17-year-old Mina, from England, arrives in New Orleans to visit her estranged sister, Libby. After growing up in the town that inspired Dracula, Mina loves nothing more than a creepy horror…
Fantasy romance is a broad genre that simply captivates and enthralls me. The combination of romance, passion, action, humor, magic, mystery, and drama ignites this spark in my heart, filling my metaphorical cup of happiness. But what makes these books so amazing is the strong female perspective they are told from. It’s not making tough decisions or embodying their masculine energies that make them strong. It’s their ability to balance dealing with external conflicts while struggling with self-confidence and loving others so completely that makes them such incredible women to read. Those are the stories I want to read, and those are the stories I want to tell.
I had never read a romance novel before, and it only took a few pages to absolutely fall in love with it and the fantasy romance genre. It really set the bar for every romance novel I’ve read since!
Witty bantering, sweet, and touching moments—sexy ones too—and the best part is the main character wasn’t a total damsel in distress! She had her s*** together…mostly. Very relatable! Smart, funny, and she’s a fighter? Sign me up.
Though the male main character was hot as hell, powerful, and darkly funny, it was really the way they played off each other and worked together that really hooked me and resonated. I absolutely love this book and I have read it easily ten times.
Amanda Devereaux has a crazy family. Her mother and older siblings are witches and psychics, and her twin sister is a vampire hunter. All Amanda wants is a quiet, normal life. Only when she finds herself the target of an attack meant for her twin, she wakes to find herself handcuffed to a sexy, blond stranger. He is Kyrian of Thrace. And while Amanda's first thought is that this might be another of her sister's attempts at extreme match-making, it soon becomes clear that Kyrian is not boyfriend material.
For Kyrian is a Dark-Hunter: an immortal warrior who has traded…
I love the mysteriousness of the past. Learning dates or the importance of battles does not yield understanding. Skillfully written historical fiction can make a reader live history—in a twelfth-century abbey or nursing in WWI. The characters I find the most gripping are outsiders: a Black man always in danger of capture and slavery, and investigating the murders of the marginalized; a monk, once a crusader, who sees human frailties clearly; or a Victorian lady, restless under the constraints of her time, who marries beneath her. Why murder mysteries? Because, although murder is forbidden in almost every culture and every religion, we still kill each other.
Benjamin January is a rarity in New Orleans 1830s; a free Black man. He is free because his mother is a place, the mistress of a wealthy white planter. Ben is educated and smart, but the casual racism of the times means he makes a living as a musician instead of a surgeon.
Despite his papers, he is always afraid of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, and that fear casts a shadow over his life.
When a beautiful quadroon is murdered, and no one cares, Ben’s sense of justice inspires him to investigate, despite risking his own freedom.
I love the exotic setting and reread every few years. I marvel at the way Hambly threads the mystery through this unusual culture.
This lush and haunting novel tells of a city steeped in decadent pleasures and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal.
It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orléans when the evening's festivities are interrupted--by murder.
The ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen…
I’ve been fascinated by New Orleans ever since hearing Bobby Bare’s novelty record “Marie Laveau” when I was a child. I had wanted to visit for ages, and Hurricane Katrina made me despair of ever getting there. Now that I’ve been there, New Orleans owns a piece of my heart. When I set out to write Bayou Fire, I was determined to do it right. I read everything I could get my hands on, fiction and non-fiction, about 1830s New Orleans. I wanted not only the facts but the atmosphere. Furthermore, I made several research trips, not only to Crescent City but to the plantations. I immersed myself in the period and the culture to the greatest degree possible to bring an authentic tale to light.
In a complete departure from the previous book, Gods of New Orleans is a dieselpunk science fiction adventure. Emma Farnsworth, her saxophone-playing boyfriend Eddie Collins, and the Conroy family have escaped from Chicago City and are going to start life again in New Orleans. However, everything they think they know about New Orleans is turned on its ear.
People of color are in charge. White people are expected to keep their eyes averted, refer to people of color as "sir" or "ma'am" ... and mixed ethnicity couples like Emma and Eddie are eyed askance. White people are also expected to carry a little tin badge with them if they're "working out" -- which is what slaves who were allowed to "sleep out" in New Orleans during the 19th C. were required to do. In short: Sikes has turned the typical examination of racism on its ear with this book.
With nothing but horror behind her, Emma Farnsworth pilots the Airship Vigilance into the night sky outside of Chicago City on a one-way trip to New Orleans. She’s carrying precious cargo: her lover and four other strays that escaped the nightmare of gods and monsters on the shores of Lake Michigan. The trip hasn’t been anything like fun, but it’s been quiet. And for Emma’s money, quiet equals good. Good enough to think they might make it to New Orleans without a hitch. Like the saying goes . . . The good things come to a fast end. Emma and…
I love music and books about the music industry. Fiction or nonfiction–the drama of a musician’s rise and efforts to sustain a career never gets old to me. I can relate to their determination to make a living doing something they love. Also, as a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, I’m fascinated by the musical history here and often meet people that had ties to the music industry and are now “regular people.” My latest novel Intermissionis about a singing group. I’ve read numerous books in this genre, from Motown bios to the five listed. What a great way to combine my two favorite things–music and books!
This is a mystery set in the gritty side of New Orleans, back alleys of the French Quarter and neighborhoods that tourists don’t see.
The murder setup is well-written and the author keeps the reader guessing about the outcome. Music lovers will appreciate the references to real singers and musicians that are woven into the story.
This is the 7th book in the Sleepy Carter detective series. There are a few references to previous books, but if you have not previously read any in this series, you won’t be lost. Fans of Walter Mosely will enjoy. I love New Orleans, (there are many mouth-watering food references in the story) and this book takes me there.
