The best books about farmers

Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching and the Art of Deception is about one-third a history of the game, one-third a detailed examination of a single game – Felix Hernandez’s 2012 perfect game, and tucked in there somewhere a history of my personal fandom which means lots of Iowa, lots of fathers and sons and Seattle and Dave Niehaus and all kinds of other stuff. These are, of course, all mixed together so you have to read the parts you didn’t know you’d like to get to the parts you did. Tricky, huh?

Holding Fast: A Memoir of Sailing, Love, and Loss is Susan Cole’s story of leaving everything behind to follow her husband's lifelong dream of sailing away. Blond, blue-eyed, irreverent John bursts into Susan’s life in her twenties with dreams of sailing off. Susan dreams of settling down. A three-year voyage with their young daughter to the Caribbean profoundly changes their lives.

Susan’s journey took her from the glitzy world of Madison Avenue advertising to riding out Hurricane Mitch, the largest hurricane on record at the time, on a sailboat in Guatemala. She hadn’t wanted to go in the first place but ended up on a life-changing odyssey. A gripping adventure story and an inspirational memoir of finding our power in the unlikeliest of places.

When Dario and his mother move to Cape Cod from Brazil, Dario has a hard time making friends because he doesn’t speak English well. But one day Dario meets someone else who has just arrived in New England, and he doesn’t speak English at all—a right whale! Inspired by the author’s real-life encounter with a whale, Dario and the Whale (Albert Whitman) captures the heart-warming efforts of a migrant boy to make friends and fit in. 

Dario is the Massachusetts selection for the Library of Congress 2021 Great Reads From Great Places award, a 2019 Massachusetts Book honoree, and recipient of numerous starred reviews including Shelf-Awareness.

Richard doesn’t have a past. For him, there is only the present: a new marriage, a first chance at fatherhood, and a quiet life as an art teacher in Virginia. Then the body of a ritualistically murdered rabbit appears on his school’s playground, along with a birthday card for him. But Richard hasn’t celebrated his birthday since he was known as Sean . . .In the 1980s, Sean was five years old when his mother unwittingly led him to tell a lie about his teacher. When school administrators, cops, and therapists questioned him, he told another. And another. And another. Each was more outlandish than the last—and fueled a moral panic that engulfed the nation and destroyed the lives of everyone around him.

Now, thirty years later, someone is here to tell Richard that they know what Sean did. Whisper Down the Lane is a tense and compulsively readable exploration of a world primed by paranoia to believe the unbelievable.

A small Appalachian town is gripped in mystery. A missing child. A mysterious death. Clandestine love affairs. Soft-spoken Cady Blue finds herself caught in the middle of all the mysterious happenings when rumors splinter the mountain people and the townsfolk. Yet, despite asserting there is no threat, Cady Blue realizes something is very, very wrong in her small town. To make matters worse, the town war hero, Matt Pritchard, has awakened feelings she has never experienced, but she feels a lingering evil that could jeopardize her chance for happiness. Secrets whispered give way to a sense of foreboding that threatens the very soul of the town, and Cady soon discovers how deadly those secrets can be.

Oakwood Sanatorium blurs the lines of psychosis and reality—science and spirituality when Dr. Shepard Blanchard finds himself investigating the strange events surrounding an unconscious man abandoned in the hospital’s lobby. 

This psychological thriller’s unique postmodern collage-style creates a foreboding atmosphere as the patients sharing the man’s assigned ward are evaluated. The psychological horror and suspense enhanced with the admission forms, patients’ stories, and doctor’s notes. From beginning to end, your sanity is on the edge of oblivion, and your senses are pricked and prodded with science fiction, alternate realities, and unexpected outcomes. The many twists and turns leave you unnerved and wondering what comes next. In the end, Blanchard questions his decisions, and ultimately, he finds himself secluded in his own dark reality.

Eva wants to run away from her life—if only she could remember how. Failing memory has forced Eva Gordon to move in with her granddaughter, Breezy, but Eva hates the bustle of Boston. She just wants to move back to quiet Cape Cod and be left alone. Then Breezy announces she's getting married, and they'll be moving to her new husband's rundown family farm, where he lives with an elderly uncle. 

It's all too much for Eva, but as her desire for privacy collides with her worsening memory, Eva finds herself in a poignant, hilarious, and intergenerational rescue effort to save her from herself. Can an unlikely cast of misfit characters step in to woo Eva from self-imposed isolation?

In 1975, budding entrepreneurs Ted and Janet purchase a floral shop and greenhouse business. Leaving behind the support and security of friends and family and their two paychecks, they transplant themselves, their one-year-old daughter, and all their belongings to Fremont, Michigan. 

Will the retiring business owners nurture Ted and Janet as they struggle to develop a blooming business? In this feel-good memoir, Arranging a Dream, laugh and cry with them as they face overwhelming challenges and heart-warming joy on their journey to turn their dreams into reality.

Johnny Holt Jr. comes home to Kentucky for the summer to find his father, JJ has made alliances with a notorious slave owner, Spanish-born Edmond Maguerro to turn Holt Lands into a million-dollar plantation. Johnny doesn’t involve himself until he meets Elisa, one of his father’s slaves. Smitten, Johnny is convinced Elisa belongs with him in New York, where he is a law student at a prestigious college, or any other world where the society is color-blind. And he goes all out to remove her from slavery and into that world. Set in 1800s American slave era, I loved a slave follows the story of two lovers as they make their way through circumstances beyond their control to escape their reality and live in a world best imagined.

The story of one woman’s journey through pain, betrayal, and forgiveness as she learns to hold onto her faith and, for the first time in her life trust in herself. Julie Holliday has always had a dream – to be the perfect wife. After she gives her heart to the love of her life, all she wants is for Dan to adore her the way she adores him. With only a high school equivalency in one hand and a fist full of ambition in the other, together they build a million-dollar empire. It seems Julie and Dan have a fairytale life – that is, until the day she realizes her love for him is not enough to stop him from having what she suspects are numerous affairs.