I’m a book binger.  I’ll admit it.  If I find an author I like, I plow through everything they write all in a row.  If I’m not stuck on an author, I’ll hit a genre and ride if for weeks.  For a while, I was all Fantasy, then Sci-Fi, then historical romance, then mystery, then non-fiction environmental, and now, memoirs.  But not famous people or historical memoirs.  More like fish out of water.  Random adventures of otherwise normal people in foreign lands.

I’ve been hooked on an English family transplanted to the Greek isle of Korfu, a sheep sheerer who moves to the hills of Spain, or a man trying to revive a neglected English garden after the war. Right now, I’ve pouring through a Thoreau-like memoir of a man who buries himself beside the Rogue River here in Oregon for a few months to wrestle some demons and I’m totally hooked.  I find myself day dreaming about escaping to a cabin somewhere out in the wild where I could roam the hills and fish for wild salmon with the bears.  Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.  When I told Kevin this, he looked at me oddly.  He could see maybe staying alone for a few weeks but for months and months?  No thank you.  I’m thinking once I finish this book I may have to pick up the source book of On Walden Pond and really immerse myself in some good old escape-to-nature reading.

As much as I love these types of books, I don’t have much luck finding them.  There are some that everyone recommends – A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun – but after you mine the obvious ores, where to go next?  I have had some blind luck in just wandering the non-fiction section of the library and grabbing arbitrary books but I’d like to find something a bit more focused.  Let’s face it, the odds of me moving to the Rogue or raising sheep in Andalusia are slim to none at the best so a good book really is my only hope!  But where to look….

Unless, of course, you could recommend something….eh?