Howdy all, I am back after a short hiatus. Not to fret, everything is fine at the Vintage domicile. It’s just that I didn’t have anything to say. I know, a little hard to believe coming from a noted raconteur such as myself. But there is no gardening going on, I am a fair weather bicyclist, and the days have been cold and dreary. I’ve just been hunkering down and enduring winter.
However, the downtime has provided my with lots of reading time. And I have a few recommendation, along with one caveat, to share with you.
Let’s get to them.
High, Wide, and Lonesome
I have used some of Hal Borland’s insightful quotes on my blog in the past. I chose to read ‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’ for a very personal reason, which I will get to shortly. But first, a little background on this book, and on Hal Borland. Hal Borland was born in Nebraska in 1900. When he was 10 years old, he moved to Colorado with his parents. His father was a newspaper editor and printer by trade, but was getting tired of the business. He wanted to homestead a plot of land courtesy of the U.S. government. If they were able to stick it out for 3 years, also known as “proving”, he intended to sell the plot. Hopefully at a profit. Sort of a turn of the 2oth century mid-life crisis.
Anyway, the family up and moved to a section of land near the town of Brush, located in northeast Colorado. The town is still around today. It’s located very near the town of Fort Morgan, Colorado.
‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’ covers the first two years of the family’s endeavors at homesteading. They battled drought, blizzards, hostile cattlemen (no shoot ’em ups though), as well as the father barely surviving a bout of typhoid. Ultimately, they persevered and successfully proved the homestead. Whereupon they sold the land, and moved further southeast, near the present town of Burlington, Colorado. There, the father purchased a newspaper, and took the printing trade back up again.
I mentioned the personal angle earlier. My great-grandmother, along with her brothers, homesteaded in the 1880s in Colorado, near the town of Bennett. My maternal grandfather was an itinerant farmer, who took jobs where he could all over the eastern plains of Colorado and southern Wyoming. His wife, and my grandmother, who was the daughter of my homesteading great-grandmother, was a schoolteacher, who often worked in one-room schoolhouses.
My mother was born in 1922, in the tiny hamlet of Kersey, Colorado. The town is still around, and has grown to a vast metropolis of 1490 souls. And many of the stories she recounted of life on the Colorado are eerily similar to those of Mr. Borland. The hard work and responsibilities undertaken at an early age. The battles against the elements. My mother dealt with something Mr. Borland couldn’t have imagined when he grew up. My mother came of age when the Dustbowl raged across the vast open prairies. devastating lives and the land.
The most humorous story she relayed to me was how she resented that on cold winter nights her brother could stand on the porch and whizz out into the yard, whereas she had to trudge all the way out to the outhouse. I will note, that my mom had no desire to ever take up farming or school teaching when she reached adulthood.
For an excellent account of the trials and tribulations of eking out a living on the prairie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you won’t go wrong with Hal Borland’s ‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’.
Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens
I’ve always been interested in ancient Greece, but most historians tend to focus on the so-called “Classical” Greek era. Ancient Greece is typically divided into Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic eras by historians. The Classical era, the time of city-states and the Peloponnesian war, is the one most of us think of when talking about ancient Greek civilization. But I’ve been curious for quite awhile about the other two time frames. How did the Greek civilization get started? What happened to the city states when Alexander the Great conquered them, and then when on to conquer half of the known world? Why were the Greeks, an established and fairly prosperous civilization, so quickly absorbed by the upstart Roman Republic?
Fortunately, I found my answers in Robin Waterfield’s Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens. Mr. Waterfield’s book is a fascinating read about the Greek people and their genius. The book is not laid out chronological order. Instead, Mr. Waterfield breaks down his subject into different issues: politics, trade, women and slaves, and so on, and how the attitudes regarding these issues changed and adapted over the centuries.
Should you be interested at all in the entirety of the ancient Greek civilization, I suggest giving Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens a try.
Heart of the Mountain
Larry Correia, author of the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, posted a long rant a couple of years ago about Science Fiction/Fantasy authors starting multi-volume series but never finishing them. You can read the rant here: https://monsterhunternation.com/2023/04/18/a-letter-to-epic-fantasy-readers-i-know-rothfuss-and-martin-hurt-you-but-its-time-to-get-over-it-and-move-on/.
His main gripe is that because some authors fail to finish their sagas, fans have become reluctant to commit to long, multi-volume epics that never reach a conclusion. Which hurts other authors in the genre. One notable example of a procrastinating author is Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series) who died before he finished his series. Another author had to be hired to complete the series based on Jordan’s notes.
The most famous example of an author failing to complete his opus, is George R.R. Martin and his Game of Thrones series. The first book in this series, A Song of Fire and Ice, was published in 1996, almost 30 years ago. Martin has been working (supposedly) on the 6th book since 2012. There is apparently a 7th book also in the works. The fact is, the series is unlikely to ever be finished, and readers are pissed.
Anyway, on the acknowledgment page for the final book in his Forgotten Warrior saga, The Heart of the Mountain, Larry Correia wrote “To George R.R. Martin. See? It’s not that hard”. Nice slam! Lol!
I’ve written before about this series, so I won’t bother you with going into details. You can see some of my previous reviews here: https://www.mrvintageman.com/whats-on-my-autumn-reading-list-for-2023/, https://www.mrvintageman.com/mrvintagemans-autumn-reading-list-for-2024/, https://www.mrvintageman.com/a-book-review-for-this-fierce-people/.
I’ll just say The Heart of the Mountain was a very satisfying conclusion to a very enjoyable series.
Passionate Gardening
The authors of Passionate Gardening, Lauren Springer and Rob Proctor, are legends in the Colorado gardening world. Lauren Springer’s first book, Undaunted Garden, was the first book to actually show just how amazing a low-water and/or Xeriscaping garden could be. Rob Proctor has written numerous books on Colorado gardening. He is a regular guest on local news stations, sharing his knowledge on best practices for Front Range gardening. He also used to have a weekly column in one of the daily newspapers. Heck, for all I know he still does. But who reads newspapers anymore?
The two authors have wildly different gardening styles. Springer’s rural garden is naturalistic, whereas Proctor’s Denver city garden is more of an English cottage garden. In spite of their different styles, they were able to cobble a book together. Passionate Gardening isn’t a how-to book. The authors provide 2 to 4 pages of info on a variety of subjects, all built around gorgeous photography. In reality, it’s more of a “coffee table book”. And that’s the only complaint I have about reading it. The book is large and unwieldy, so it is physically awkward to comfortably read.
I’ve never understood the point coffee table books. You purchase a book not to read, but just to put it out for display? Weird
The Wealth of Nations
Here comes the caveat. I’ve mentioned before that I am working my way through the Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf of Books that I was given as a gift many, many years ago. I decided, now that I am partially retired, that it was time to work my way through the 50 volumes, ten pages at a time. The first nine volumes were interesting. Some were more sleep inducing than others, but overall, I’ve been enjoying them. Then, I reached volume 10, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Oh, my God! This book was brutal! Mr. Smith was a big proponent of the maxim of military instructors everywhere: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. Over and over again. Mr. Smith was certainly verbose, able to stretch one sentence into at least 4 or 5 paragraphs. My edition came in at nearly 600 pages, but editions with all the appendices are supposed to reach nearly 1000. There’s a story that a writer for the Cato Institute was able to break Wealth of Nations down to its main points in just 7 1/2 pages.
Unless you are college student required to read this book, or are a masochist, I highly recommend avoiding this book at all costs!
What I am reading now: P.J. O’Rourke On the Wealth of Nations
During one of our regular brewery explorations, I mentioned to my good buddy Dave S. that I was wading my way through Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He asked me how it was going. I gave him a one word response: Awful!
He laughed, and then recommended to me P.J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations. He and I have both been big fans of O’Rourke going back to the eighties. If you have never read him, he applies a sardonic humor to current events. Or did. He passed away in 2022. My all time favorite quote from him was regarding Europe during the Reagan years. Back then, before the EU, you had to go through customs whenever you went from one European country to another. Mr. O’Rourke snarked on the tiny size of European countries by stating “you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without it going through customs six times.”
Anyway, on to On The Wealth of Nations. Mr. O’Rourke subtly mixes humor and serious discourse on Adam Smith’s ponderous tome. He applies, at the time of publication of this book (2007), current economic events to help highlight the points Adam Smith was writing about by making them more relatable to the modern reader. I’m only a few chapters in, but P.J. O’Rourke has made it quite evident why Adam Smith is considered to be a genius. And he makes it does it in funny, yet poignant, way. So far, highly recommend.
Finis
So, that is what I have been up to over the past couple of months.
How about you? How have you been passing the time during the cold and dark days of winter?
