It happens every generation or so. Urban dwellers, tired of the hustle and bustle of the big city, garner their resources (especially their cash), and move to the country. Once there, they write a book about their adventures. It's a phenomena that Joel Salatin, the self-proclaimed "Christian conservative libertarian environmentalist lunatic famer" and a key player in Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma calls "a longing to reconnect with Grandpa's farm."

We're in the midst of another rural renaissance (the last one being the back-to-the-land movement that occurred in the 1970s) and it has produced some good reads. Top on my list is Michael Perry's Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg. Perry grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, so he's no stranger to rural life. Part of the charm of the book is how Perry takes what he learned from that childhood and applies it to his current situation. You might also enjoy his other books Truck: A Love Story and Population: 485.

Not all farmer wannabes leave the city, however. In her memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Novella Carpenter tells of creating a rural oasis in an Oakland neighborhood where drug deals and gunfights are not uncommon. She prefers it to the countryside, where she believes rural isolation broke up the marriage of her back-to-the-lander parents. It's a witty and engaging, but tenderhearted readers are forewarned: much of the book deals with the raising of animals for food.

Let's head back to the country for a moment and Michael Ableman's Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It. Ableman is a farmer in British Columbia and this book chronicles his journey with his son across the United States in search of "innovative and passionate farmers who are making a difference in what we eat and how we experience food." Ableman's own photographs illustrate this lavish and loving memoir.

For those who would rather read about the day-to-day workings of a farm than experience it themselves, give The Seasons on Henry's Farm by Terra Brockman a try. Henry's Farm is "multigenerational, small-scale, labor-intensive farming operation" in central Illinois. No country bumpkin farm, this operation has its own webpage, Facebook page and weekly e-mail newsletter. The book chronicles a year on the farm beginning in November when the garlic is planted and ending in October with the last harvest. It's a book to savor.

As a fellow book group member reminded me at our last meeting, it's good to read the classics, so here are a few farming classics that I consider required reading:

Malabar Farm and Pleasant Valley by Louis Bromfield
The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon
The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
One Man's Meat by E.B. White
The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

And for the fiction readers, here a few select titles:

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
The Plain Sense of Things by Pamela Carter Joern
Light in the Crossing by Kent Meyers (also try his memoir, The Witness of Combines)
Driftless by David Rhodes
Land that Moves, Land that Stands Still by Kent Nelson
My Antonia and O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
What This River Keeps by Greg Schwipps

For more reading suggestions, talk with your local librarian!