David Mas Masumoto and his delicious books

The only side benefit to the fact that everyone in our family had the flu over the Christmas holiday is that somehow this made it easier for me to find time to read. I was at my parents' house and my sister sent my mom and dad three books by David Mas Masumoto, a peach, nectarine, and grape farmer in the Central Valley who writes about his fruit farming.

The books she sent are:

Epitaph of a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm
Wisdom of the Last Farmer: harvesting legacies from the land
and The Perfect Peach (a cookbook, with stories and sidebits)

I read the first, I'm almost done with the second, and I skimmed through the third.

Luscious and lovely. I loved them.

My own environment could have contributed to the whole experience.

My parents have some land. My dad has some fruit trees. (Snicker, snicker, that's a joke.)

My father has about 100 fruit trees, some thriving, some dying, most fruit bearing. Peaches, nectarines, pluots, apriums, plums, apples, a lone olive, and one persimmon tree he planted for my second son, berry brambles, and some other trees he says he got suckered into buying.

These trees are wintering now, and it was cold. Windy. Blustery. I sat inside the warm house, my kids squirreling around in the background, and I read about pruning trees and planting trees and summer days with sticky ripe peach juice dribbling down awaiting chins. And Dad's trees rattled and shook on the other side of the glass, their bare branches whipping in the winter wind. Masumoto's tales and telling of peach farming and life as a farmer resonated with this daughter of a "backyard" orchardist.

I do recommend the books. It seemed to me that Epitaph was written more as a series of short-essays pieced together sequentially to make a novel. Not that this is a distraction, necessarily, just an observation and a nice way for Masumoto to debut his writing.

Good writing overall, I'd say. And totally squeaky clean. You could take it to a church book group and no one would waggle a disapproving finger at you.

I think I want to own these three.