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oneSafe Pix 3

Photo & Video and Utilities

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• "There’s no better option than oneSafe Pix." [Luke Patrick - The iPhone App Review] • "For...

MetaMoJi Note - note taking and PDF annotation app

Productivity and Business

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MetaMoJi Note is a note and sketchbook app, PDF annotation tool, voice memo and digital scrapbook...

vjay for iPhone

Music and Entertainment

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NOTE: This app requires iPhone 4S, iPod touch 5th gen or better ...

Battery! (Calculator + Custom Themes)

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Ever wonder how much battery life your device has left? Wish you could know if you can finish that...

Rachel King (13 KP) rated Crescendo (Hush, Hush, #2) in Books

Feb 11, 2019

I waited quite a while for my tiny, local library to get this book in for me, and I devoured it in about a day and a half. Ironically, I was a little disappointed with the way it turned out in the end, as I do not really consider that much of an ending at all. It felt more like one of those cliff-hangers television writers use when they have run out of air time. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The book flowed much like the first book in the series. It opened with a scene that takes place in an undetermined time period in relation to the previous book. Then it finally returns to Nora and her life, which is assumed to be perfect since Patch has become her own personal guardian angel. But as usual, unexplained events happen and Patch keeps Nora in the dark. Nora behaves in her predictable, highly emotional ways and gets herself in one bad situation after another. I could not help thinking that so much of Nora and Patch's problems could have been avoided if they both would have been completely honest with each other from the beginning.
Because the book is told mostly through Nora's viewpoint, I felt as much in the dark about what was really happening as Nora did, which became very frustrating after several hundred pages. Even after the book ended, I still had a number of questions regarding the Nephilim secret society, such as the deal with the multiple rings. Hopefully, these will be answer in the final book, Silence. I did find the character of Scott growing on me towards the end, as it became obvious how much of a victim he was, which made me wonder how many more there were like him. Marcie was just as annoying as ever, though I guessed what her problem with Nora was very early in the book, which only created more unanswered questions. And really, how hard would it have been for Nora to just read the diary? That drove me bonkers.
On the whole, as much as I loved the first book, this book was a distant second in many ways. I can only hope that the concluding book fixes what was wrong with this book.

Kudos

Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated The Food Forest Handbook: Design and Manage a Home-Scale Perennial Polyculture Garden in Books

May 30, 2019

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Another book in my permaculture research, this in-depth guide is definitely going on my To-Buy list. (I always check these out from the library before spending money on personal copies.)

There is SO MUCH information in this book. Unlike some of the other books, there's no big spreads of full-color, glossy photos (which can be useful, I'm not digging on those); The Food Forest Handbook is mostly text with a few black-and-white photos tucked in. There are spreadsheets and diagrams and lists, sidebars of useful information, how-to walkthroughs and case studies of specific plants. I'm not sure how they packed so much into a little over 200 pages, but this book is a treasure trove of permaculture strategies.

The book starts with a chapter on why permaculture is important; they explore past examples of permaculture, some present food forests, and why it could be useful to us going forward. The second chapter gets into designing a food forest to fit your needs - scoping out your site, determining what resources you have, all of the planning aspects. Then we have a short chapter on putting all that knowledge together and going "from concept sketch to detailed designs" - how to refine your research and plans into something you can work off of. Chapter 4 is about selecting the specific plants; going from "okay here I want a fruit tree and a nitrogen fixer" to "a peach and comfrey." Plant varietals are discussed here, as well as the different needs of tree guilds.

The rest of the book gets into maintenance, harvesting, and propagating the food forest, and the last chapter is on a tour of established food forests in various climates, to see what's possible.

This is definitely a book I want on my resource shelf; it can get a little dry at points, but there is so much knowledge here. One thing I really liked was the diagram of tree shapes - if one tree says it has a conical shape when full grown, and one has a pyramid shape, there's a diagram that shows what exactly the difference is.

Overall an excellent, information-packed book, if a little difficult to read straight through.You can read all my book reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.com