A fabulous book!

First let me just say how much I love libraries! I often come back from a walk at lunchtime near my work with an arm full of books I've borrowed out from the local library up the road (sometimes it can be quite difficult getting them all home since I catch the bus and have to lug them all the way home, very heavy!).

Earlier this week I once again popped up to the library to return a few overdue books (I have so many I forget which are mine and which belong to the library!), and came back with another armfull. This time including a meditteranean vegetarian cookbook (so many yummy dishes to make!), a learn to knit book (I'm struggling to get past the basic crochet stitches so thought knitting might be a good diversion), a herbal book (good to know what things I can plant to create my own garden medicine cabinet) and a book titled "Ten Thousand Acres" by Patrice Newell.

Has anyone read this book, or any others by Patrice?

I hadn't heard of the author before but the front cover struck me.

So I've finished reading the book already! Not hard since the writing is very easy to follow, its not too full of text (has lots of brilliant photography!) and the story is so beautifully written.

Here is how Patrice describes her book on her website:

Ten Thousand Acres – A Love Story goes beyond the angers and arguments of debates on ecology and climate change to the deepest feelings we have for our farm and the wild landscape that embraces it.


It goes beyond the crops and the cattle, high above the olive groves and the old homestead into the old stories hidden in its hundred hills and valleys.


We do not really own our farm, let alone the ancient landscape that rises above it.
Ten Thousand Acres IS a love story – of how the place has come to own us. It is my book of endless discovery of the extraordinary riches that surround us, in the dark of night and the harshest days of drought.
It is about the wild aviary of birds, the boundless zoo of native animals, the abundance of beauty, of trees, plants, grasses and botanic secrets.
I hope to make a contribution to the literature of ‘place’, the new awareness that Australians must have for all the Australia’s within our immense continent.
In words and pictures, my book sets out to reveal the love we must have for the totality of the natural world – the respect for the land that is essential if we (and I mean all of us, ‘all creatures great and small’) are to have a hope of survival.


I fell in love with the writing, and here to prove how beautiful it is, here is my favourite passage:

"On exactly the same day as last year, two frogmouths arrive and take their place side by side on their favourite branch in their preferred ironbark tree. I look up at them. They look down at me.
A few weeks later there are four of them. Two big-eyed babies.
Things are as they should be." pg 93

Looking on her website I see she has another book I'd be interested to read, "The Olive Grove." It's the story of when she moved from the city out to the country, definitely something I'd like to read!

How's your weekend's going?

:)
Kim