clew's reviews: a book log

A Country Year, Sue Hubbell

Essays on living in the Ozarks making a bare rural living raising bees for honey, written by a fiftyish single woman with more gumption than training for the job.

I liked it a lot better than the recent crop of My Year In Provence/Capri/Tuscany fantasies. It's not luxurious, and not self-pitying or self-mocking in the Betty Macdonald tradition: the best thing about the book, and what I would most like to know the author for, is plain close observation of whatever's around her. She particularly likes insects and arachnids; there are details of surprising moth-ear-mite life cycles that I don't think I'd have learned about elsewhere. (Although I have run across similar suprising news about lobster-lip symbiotes, so you never know.)

There are, be warned, essays on her dogs, old trucks, muddy roads, and reroofing the barn, and most of the essays run

1. quotidian detail
2. naturalist or practical complication
3. generalization
4. faintly sentimental, or philosophical, brief conclusion

much like Lewis Thomas' essays, which I also like. Reading them one at a time would have been better.

ISBN: 0-06-097086-3 So wrote clew in History (21st c.).