Doug Fine's thoughts and recollections on his first year of sustainable and eco-friendly living, Farewell, My Subaru, is an accessible, funny, sensible foray into environmentally thoughtful living and environmentalism, which I would recommend to anyone. Despite your political affiliations, views on gun control, or religion (unless you bathe in oil and club baby seals before your breakfast of genetically modified food pellets) you will find Fine's treatise on the simple and immensely rewarding joys of sustainable living, growing your own food and connecting to the earth around you a tempting and rational call to a richer way of life.

Not only charming, hilarious and heart-winning, it is peppered with factoids and garnished with mouth watering recipes Fine prepared with his own cultivated and carefully tended fruits of labor. His dedication to his goals and aspirations is inspiring to say the least. I mean, I love ice cream, and I love the homemade variety. But I don't know if I could go so far as to raise, vaccinate and shepherd goats for over a year in order to make it. And yet, when Fine describes it, it doesn't only seem possible, but enviable.

Fine weathers floods, droughts, hail, coyotes, loneliness, bureaucratic paperwork, clogged fuel lines, a runaway car, and all other unimaginable challenges with humor, grace and an indomitable spirit that keeps you cheering him on! While certainly an environmentalist, Fine is not strictly a vegetarian, and even hunts which might put off some hard core Greenies, but is forgivable given his unique attempt at the activity.

I might have been the only hunter in New Mexico history to have his laptop, complete with wireless Internet, with him as he aimed for dinner, and so I sent a lot of colorful e-mails to friends about sunsets ... I had packed local bean burritos for the trip, so Sadie and I ate quite splendidly as well. As we dined, we listened to NPR.

Needless to say, his hunting was unsuccessful. Read, enjoy, then recycle this book by passing it along!

I loved Dairy Queen, so I was very eager to read The Off Season. It took a lot of turns I didn't expect, which makes it hard for me to review it, because as always I don't want to spoil the surprises for anyone else.

Picking up essentially where we left off, D.J. has passed sophomore English and is good to go with football. The team is totally psyched to have her. Unfortunately, not all that far into things, a certain situation at school puts that all in jeopardy. Add to it a physical consideration, which could impact her entire future, and D.J. has got herself one tough decision to make.

Brian is as charming as ever, especially on their trip to Minneapolis. But it's not long before you start to get a feeling about him. And possibly not the one you were expecting to have.

One of the only lights to really shine in the midst of all this is Curtis, who sneaks around and wins himself an award, all the while never correcting anyone's misconceptions about what he was actually doing. That's just the way it goes in the Schwenk family. Communication pretty much does not exist.

Which makes Win's accident all the more troublesome. Again, D.J., still just a High School kid, steps in to take the lead, pulling the rest of them along behind her, until everyone eventually learns to stand on their own two feet.

I'm not sure I saw any of this coming. All in all, I think this book was nothing that I expected it to be. But I still really enjoyed it, and it's a great testament to strength of character. For all that she thinks she's not all that much, we could all stand to have a little D.J. in us.

This is a book about the way in which war disrupts the lives of ordinary people, even when they are remote from the action. It also challenges our ideas of patriotism, courage, enmity and love.

Esther is "The Welsh Girl", living a quiet life as a farmer's daughter, and barmaid in the village pub during the Second World War. A prisoner of war camp is built nearby, in which Karsten, a German soldier who has surrendered, is placed. This camp brings disruption to the village, exposing feelings of hatred of the English towards the Germans, and of the Welsh towards the English. There is also a visitor to the village, Rotheram, a German Jew who lives in England, and whose job it is to question the German war criminal, Hess. This novel is the story of what happens when these people interact.

The notion of shame is at the heart of the novel. Esther is ashamed because she is pregnant by an English soldier who has raped her. Karsten, and the other German prisoners, are shamed by their surrender. Rotheram is ashamed because he and his mother fled from persecution in Germany. The interaction between the characters results in them realising that ideas of patriotism, nationality, and courage are arbitrary, and more complex than wartime propaganda would have them believe. Each character realises this in his/her own way.

This is a gentle novel, which is not very plot driven, which I found problematic at first. However, I like to read something different, which this is, although the themes are a bit well-worn. Once I got into the book, I enjoyed it, being especially interested in the Welsh perspective on the war. Not a riveting read, but good all the same.