Citizen Reader

So I got to page 200 of Arlo Crawford's memoir A Farm Dies Once a Year before I admitted to myself that I just don't like this Arlo kid or his book, and I'm going to stop reading it now.

I know. I really have to get both more efficient and honest with myself and stop reading things that I dislike before, you know, I get 200 pages in. On the other hand, I feel like I have read enough of this book to say, yeah, don't bother.

Crawford grew up on a vegetable/farm marketing farm in Pennsylvania. His parents had moved to the farm in their late twenties/early thirties and made a going concern of it, and the actual descriptions of the farm and the marketing work are vivid and interesting enough.

But overall, although Crawford admits he enjoyed his upbringing and is proud of what his parents have achieved, he wants to do something else with his life. He wants to do something artsy or literary or whatever else it is well-educated and good-looking urban millennials do with their lives these days. And that's okay. But, if I'm telling the absolute truth, I was a little annoyed that an agent was able to sell a publisher on this not terribly interesting, not really back to the land memoir, in hardcover no less.

Here's another review of it if you'd like more of the nuts and bolts of the story, or if you feel I'm being unfair.

Have a good weekend, all.