Books tangentially related to homesteading
Mike asked me to post a list of the books I have that are related to homesteading and homebuilding, so here it is. Note that the connection of some of these to homesteading is extremely tenuous.
- From Eco-Cities to Living Machines
- The Foxfire Book
- Creating Alternative Futures
- Guns, Germs and Steel
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- The Sierra Club Family Outdoors Guide
- Allen & Mike’s Really Cool Backpackin’ Book
- Stalking the Wild Asparagus
- The One-Straw Revolution
- Noah’s Garden
- Home Remedies
- The Dandelion Celebration
- Back to Eden
- Square Foot Gardening
- Bucky Works
- Whole Earth Catalog (Last, Next, Essential, and Millenium editions)
- Whole Earth Review (several years worth of back issues)
- Paper Houses
- Home Work
- The Dome Builder’s Handbook
- Dome Notes
- The Healthy Home
- Ancient Inventions
- Human Scale
- The Zen of Seeing
- The Book of Visions
- Solar Living Sourcebook
- Possible Human
- Archery Handbook
- Green Belt Cities
- Energy for Man
- Small Spaces
- Living on the Earth
- Intentional Communities
- Earth Sheltered Community Design
- The Underground House Book
- Earthship
- Everyday Life in Early Imperial China
- Trades and Crafts of Old Japan
- Native Funk and Flash
- Dome Magazine back issues
- Home Power back issues
- The Secret House
- Critical Path
- Biomimicry
- Tools for Conviviality
- Deschooling Society
- Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Lateral Thinking
- Nine Chains to the Moon
- Raising Your Spirited Child
- Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
- Little House in the Big Woods (and all the others in this series)
- The Herb Book
- Architecture Without Architects
- The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall
- Box Beam Sourcebook
- Transmaterial (and see the related blog)
- Every issues of Make Magazine
- Radios that Work for Free
- Radio Shack Getting Started with Electronics
- Synergetics
- Boy Scout Pioneering Handbook
- Making Things
- WorldChanging (also see related blog)
- Serious Play
- The End of Education
- The Ingenuity Gap
- Fab
- Zome (a construction toy)
- Years of backissues of Utne Reader
- The Utne Reader Almanac
Some of these books I haven’t read yet. Some, like the Ingenuity Gap, are on my reading shelf to get to soon. There are some which are full of brainstorming positive ideas for solving real problems in the world (WorldChanging, The Book of Visions, Utne Reader Almanac, Whole Earth Catalogs). Looking at this list it might appear that I’m really into domes and earth-sheltered homes, but that’s not really the case. I’m leaning much more towards straw bale construction these days, but most of the books I’ve read on it have been from the library.
Speaking of books that I don’t have, I would like to recommend a few:
- Hurricane Kitchen
- Shaping Things
- The Chair (for the short form, see this essay: What’s wrong with the chair?
- Passive Solar Energy
- Gentle Architecture
- A Pattern Language
- The 20-Minute Gardener
Of the rest, some I would recommend with all my heart, some I would not. But that will have to wait for another post.