Book a Month Challenge: September

Please take note: I am so on top of it that I am filing my Book a Month Challenge report before the month is over with. Because I rock. September's theme is "Change." I read "Farewell My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living" by Doug Fine. Apparently Doug Fine is an NPR correspondent, but I have been slavishly addicted to NPR for about 10 years and his name completely fails to ring a bell. Not a single one. Not even a little jingle bell. Perhaps he is a periodic (wannabe) NPR correspondent. Anyway, Mr. Fine sells everything he owns in some big city on the east coast and moves to Silver City, New Mexico where he purchases a small house on forty acres of land (see, this book is all about "change"--I'm on time and on theme, feel free to bask in my glory.) Mr. Fine's intent is to live as locally as possible and his book chronicles his adventures in local living: gardening, rainwater harvesting, solar panel installation, and bio-dieseling. Mr. Fine is single (or was at the time of the writing of the book), does not have children, and apparently has an endless, mysterious source of income. And the dude totally stole my dream. But he did not steal it well. I was repeatedly amazed in reading this book how not with it Mr. Fine-the-alleged-NPR-correspondent was. I must have thought to myself at least 20 times, "dude, what were you thinking?" For example, he let his chickens run around his yard, without the protection of the dog (who was confined to the house for the night for some reason that had to do with the author's girlfriend or something), and coyotes ate the chickens. And he describes this as if it was completely reasonable to think that you could let your chickens run around your yard in the desert and that they would die of old age and not coyote poultry-icide. However, it's probably unreasonable of me to think that everyone who attempts this sort of lifestyle is going to have a knowledge base of someone like Moses and it's probably good to have an honest account of the pitfalls of sustainable living out there. And also, if I were to attempt this sort of thing on my own (without Moses) I'd probably be worse off than Mr. Fine, alleged NPR correspondent, so I probably shouldn't talk. Although, I wouldn't let my chickens run around willy-nilly as coyote bait. On the upside, the book is a light funny read on pursuing the sustainable life and is very entertaining, if not completely informative, read.