Book Review: Zoro's Field (Slightly Incoherent Edition)

Hey look, it's Chris Christopherson Thomas Rain Crowe!

One of the ways in which life occasionally decides to toss me a curve ball is by completely screwing over my sleeping schedule for one day each year. The times where this happens are so disconnected from each other that it's difficult to establish causality. However, what I usually do when I can't get to sleep is catch up on reading.

Thus ended my reading Zoro's Field, which I allowed to lay fallow in my Kindle for approximately three and a half weeks before devouring it in a single sitting last night. Thomas Rain Crowe is a pretty good writer, despite the sheer awkward awfulness of his beatnik style poetry at the end of each chapter. Take Walden, mix in a third of "Woo Woo" by volume, and you get Zoro's Field. I think I'd like Crowe if I met him in real life, but I think I'd have to keep eye-rolling to a minimum when he starts talking about being neighbors with deer and being in communion with Mother Nature. 

Or perhaps I'm just being cranky because of only getting three hours sleep.

At any rate; this is in fact the second time I've read the book. I once had a paperback copy that I passed on to a friend and fellow warrior in the good fight for self-sufficiency. I missed having a copy of my own, though, and since we're all kinds of new-fangled up in here I ordered a replacement in kindle format last year. I actually requested it to be put in Kindle well before then, so  I was pleased to see the publisher release it on Amazon (Thanks UG-Press!).

I'm giving Zoro's Field a solid 90 out of 100 on my scale. There's some parts I gloss over because he delves too much in the Beatnik stuff for my taste, but the book overall is another one of those "living deliberately" experiences that I'm so covetous of. Perhaps one of these days I'll get my own cabin in the woods to live simply, albeit in short bursts, to watch nature parade by in.