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The first thing that hooked me about this book is that it that the author farms just outside of Bismarck.  Local connection!  I had never heard of him or the farm, but Anna was given the book by someone so we threw it on the bookshelf to read eventually.  Then we happened to see Gabe at the recent Pride of Dakota exhibition and said we already had the book, which he had on display.  I bought some horseradish beef sticks from him (actually were not amazing tasting...) and made a mental note to read the book soon.

So I brought the book to read over Christmas vacation and it was a great read.  It was very interesting to read about advanced or maybe even "hippy" farming techniques.  Never have I felt such desire to buy some destitute land and spend 15 years bringing it back to life--hopefully that fades rapidly!  I have limited knowledge of the other side of the story (traditional farming) so it would be interesting to hear that perspective.  But everything in this book does seem to make sense.

Ehhh...let's just say I mostly agree with the two or three out of five reviews.  At 40% I was reasonably certain I wouldn't finish the book, but I guess I just needed a little break (also motivated to finish a book to mark that goal off of my list).

This book is notably lacking of interesting science concepts.  Also, I can't remember anything truly interesting about the ways in which the alternate history deviates from real history.

I picked this book out at the library as the one to read to complete my goal of reading a book during my four weeks off between jobs.  I wandered the shelves looking for books that looked like sci-fi (somehow it seems like one can pick them out pretty easily by the title, font, and imagery on the spine...I can't quite explain it) and found this one, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it won Hugo and Nebula awards.  Should be a good one!

Unfortunately I did not enjoy it and stopped in the middle of chapter six.  This is where you final get the reveal that the book is about old gods versus new gods.  I had been dragging myself through the book up to hear and at this point I realized it was not going to be interesting.  As a final check I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and even that was boring.

Learning about the House on the Rocks in Wisconsin was very interesting, and I plan to try to find a list of other interesting locations like that which are mentioned in the book.  IIRC the intro alluded to people doing road trips tracing the characters' travels so there must be a few other good destinations.

The version I had was the one with annotations by Leslie S. Klinger.  I did enjoy the presence of the annotations even though they slowed down my pace of reading, and would readily read another annotated book.