Farewell My Subaru

Today we have a guest review coming to us from Maya at The Gamble Life. She has several other interesting reviews on her site through using the tool GoodReads. Maya gave us permission to reprint:

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living by Doug Fine

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Doug Fine moves to New Mexico and sets up his home trying to live entirely locally--this turns out primarily to mean going off the electric grid and growing a garden. It's a great goal and a great idea for a book, but this book is very, very light. He seems to approach the issues seriously in his actions, but his writing is more focused on being light-hearted and funny.

I thought the best part of the book was the Afterword where he lists his suggestions, but he calls them conclusions, of the most important steps to take to reduce one's carbon footprint.It did make me want to raise chickens. My family raised chickens when I was a kid and I have great memories of them running around in the backyard and of eating their eggs! I think raising chickens is going on my list of things I want to do when we get back to Austin.

I think this would be good for someone who is afraid of getting a depressing book on the environment. Although he does include related facts in little offset blurbs every few pages. I found them sort of annoying and wish they'd been worked into the text instead of just stuck in between different paragraphs.

I've been thinking a lot about what I can do to rely less on oil and I was hoping for a more serious book about what one person did. Instead it's a collection of mostly funny stories about setting up solar panels, biofuel, the hazards of coyotes on chickens, and how weeds can actually help a garden sometimes.

Thanks for letting us repost Maya! It is nice to bring different voices to The Blogging Bookworm.