[.ca] My Garden (Book) (ISBN 0374527768)

the thickness of things:
"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?

Tedious - Good Word:
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...

Skip it:
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.

Not my kind of gardening book:
Parts of this book were fairly interesting, but the first chapter was awful. It took a while to get used to her writing style which is very disjointed and rambling. I found myself asking questions about her and her garden which were never addressed in the book. Allen Lacy is a much better gardener/philosopher/writer.

A Gardening Reflection:
Gardening is one of the "loves" of my life, and the garden is where I do my serious thinking about another one of my great "loves"-reading. This book is delicious!!! As Joseph Campbell said, "Reading takes or opens doors to places that you've not yet traveled." Ms. Kincaid pushed me in a direction so rewarding that I marvel at her ability to express so well man's relationship with and desire to garden. For those of you who couldn't see or get the big picture, I say read it again with an open mind. My reflections on her musings will keep me happily digging in the dirt for quite a while.