My Garden Book

Rating:
Summary: the thickness of things
Review: "Oh, how I like the rush of things, the thickness of things . . ."

Oh, how I like Kincaid's My Garden (Book). I am halfway through it and realize I had better slow down, because I am not going to find another book on the garden I like nearly so much as this one, probably for a very long time. I've got a stack of other books, none so good, and I will use My Garden (Book) like a tiny slice of truffle among the more common and less delicious food on my plate. Rationing is the only option.

What I like about her (among the everything else I like about her) is that she doesn't like Asiatic Lilies because their colors remind her of a hallucinogenic drug she took once ever seven days for a year when she was young. This is the best sort of confession to make in a gardening book.

She also confesses to amassing large debts and threatening letters from creditors about her garden habit. She confesses to being a messy, careless person with a messy house. All these confessions endear her to me. The weaknesses balance the austere authority of her prose, which also endears her to me.

Her garden aesthetic - odd, overgrown, intense and personal, wild, even, endears her to me. I remember reading a bit of memoir in the New Yorker that involved her experiments with coffee enemas. This struck me as the strangest thing I had ever read (because perhaps I was still a teenager in Kansas and ready to be struck by things). Enemas? The reason for them escaped me, but with coffee none the less - or espresso? I paid careful attention to the byline of that piece, wanting to find more of this sort of writing.

Later, one of her essays was in a book I used as a graduate teaching assistant. When I saw her name, I took a sip of coffee.

I like Ms. Kincaid because she doesn't love the writing of Vita Sackville-West. She says that the best literary companion to Vita's gardens is the autobiography of Nina Simone. How could this not be love? The best companion to life is Nina Simone and gardening like Vita Sackville-West.

How could I not see bringing Ms. Kincaid a bouquet of flowers in exquisite yellows and sharing a cocktail in some overgrown, wild garden someday? How could I not tell everyone I know who enjoys the garden or good writing to pick up this book immediately and fall in love?

Rating:
Summary: the thickness of things
Review: "Oh, how I like the rush of things, the thickness of things . . ."

Oh, how I like Kincaid's My Garden (Book). I am halfway through it and realize I had better slow down, because I am not going to find another book on the garden I like nearly so much as this one, probably for a very long time. I've got a stack of other books, none so good, and I will use My Garden (Book) like a tiny slice of truffle among the more common and less delicious food on my plate. Rationing is the only option.

What I like about her (among the everything else I like about her) is that she doesn't like Asiatic Lilies because their colors remind her of a hallucinogenic drug she took once ever seven days for a year when she was young. This is the best sort of confession to make in a gardening book.

She also confesses to amassing large debts and threatening letters from creditors about her garden habit. She confesses to being a messy, careless person with a messy house. All these confessions endear her to me. The weaknesses balance the austere authority of her prose, which also endears her to me.

Her garden aesthetic - odd, overgrown, intense and personal, wild, even, endears her to me. I remember reading a bit of memoir in the New Yorker that involved her experiments with coffee enemas. This struck me as the strangest thing I had ever read (because perhaps I was still a teenager in Kansas and ready to be struck by things). Enemas? The reason for them escaped me, but with coffee none the less - or espresso? I paid careful attention to the byline of that piece, wanting to find more of this sort of writing.

Later, one of her essays was in a book I used as a graduate teaching assistant. When I saw her name, I took a sip of coffee.

I like Ms. Kincaid because she doesn't love the writing of Vita Sackville-West. She says that the best literary companion to Vita's gardens is the autobiography of Nina Simone. How could this not be love? The best companion to life is Nina Simone and gardening like Vita Sackville-West.

How could I not see bringing Ms. Kincaid a bouquet of flowers in exquisite yellows and sharing a cocktail in some overgrown, wild garden someday? How could I not tell everyone I know who enjoys the garden or good writing to pick up this book immediately and fall in love?

Rating:
Summary: Skip it
Review: Has this woman never heard of punctuation? Her sentences are so long you practically have to tie yourself in a knot to read them. This is a shame, because before I got turned off by the sentence length I had spotted some fresh ideas. I toiled on until I realized there was no depth of knowledge behind the ideas. There are lots of good, even great, books of garden essays out there. Don't waste your time on this one.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious - Good Word
Review: I couldn't finish this book, and usually I finish books too quickly. The reviewer who described her book/writing style as tedious wins the prize from me. I think I would have liked her piece if she wrote differently. But...

Rating:
Summary: Tedious - Good Word
Review: I couldn't finish this book, and usually I finish books too quickly. The reviewer who described her book/writing style as tedious wins the prize from me. I think I would have liked her piece if she wrote differently. But...

Rating:
Summary: Insufferable
Review: I found this book insufferable, and didn't get to finish it. The contrived title should have tipped me off. Why isn't Amazon listing it correctly? It should be My Garden (Book):

For started, i don't really care for Jamaica Kincaid's writing style. She uses punctuation sparsely, and you go for what it seems like a mile with no period in sight. In the meantime, she has branched in a myriad of extra information, and after a while it gets to be too much to keep track of. This is not stream of consciousness writing, or at least not the good kind anyway.

What really did me in was the beginning of her anecdote titled "Reading":

"It was a day in late October and I had two thousand dollars' worth of heirloom bulbs to place in the ground [...]"

If that wasn't enough, then she continues:

"I do not like winter or anything that represents it ..."

What is she doing then living in Vermont?!

She came across as a malcontent human being who agonizes over insignificant stuff, like the exact month her wisterias bloom. She takes the joy out of gardening, and out of reading.

Rating:
Summary: Gentle beautiful life-of-a-gardener book
Review: I liked it; I liked it very much. Contrary to the opinion of one of the other reviewers, it is not a showing off exercise for latin knowledge, and any self respecting gardener will empathise with thoughts of rabbit destruction when gazing upon the obliteration of a carefully planned and expensively nurtured border. I thought it was an enchanting read, particularly the descriptions of the visits to the Chelsea Flower show and Jamaica's reactions to the various eminent English garden luminaries encountered there! Maybe I am biased, but she likes the same plants I do, and I had the magical feeling of my own problems and loves materialising before my eyes on print. So there, to the grouch who only gave it one star! OK, so she doesn't have the extensive encyclopaedic knowledge of a plant biology PhD, but that would be missing the point. Most of us don't - we just like gardening, and gaining bits of knowledge as we go and grow. One of my current faves.

Rating:
Summary: A Gardening Reflection
Review: I love gardens, but I don't have a green thumb. I don't why I picked this book up, but I did. This work does not detail the Latin names for plants or teach you how to layout your garden designs based on climate and soil conditions. It is a voyage of discovery of the self through the tending of a garden. An intriguing concept well written by Jamaica. Through her knowledge and experiences as a gardener, she began to understand her history, thoughts, decision-making, home, desires, fears, everything that makes her a woman, with a family, living on earth. Do not read this book for tips on gardening. Read this book for personal insights through the tending and building of gardens in connection to one's mind, body, soul, and heritage.