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By the author of Be Ready for Anything and the online course Bloom Where You’re Planted
Last week, I showed you the list of my personal favorite preparedness books and asked you for your favorites. Many of these, I hadn’t heard of, while others, I just hadn’t read or overlooked. But what we have here is an amazing list of books to add to your survival and preparedness library.
For some, I was able to provide links so that you can get them. Others weren’t as easy to find, but you can be on the lookout for them when you hit thrift stores, libraries, and yard sales. The listings below all have the reasons that the reader recommended them.
Happy reading!
The Reader’s Choice Survival and Preparedness Library – Non-Fiction
General Preparedness
- The LDS Preparedness Manual (Note: If you aren’t looking for a hard copy, you can download it free at this link.)
- Just in Case
- Survival Theory: A Preparedness Guide
- How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It
- The Prepper’s Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for an Emergency
- How to Prepare for Most Emergencies on a $50 a Month Budget
- US Army FM 21-76 Field Survival Manual
- Boy Scout Handbook
Food
- The Foragers Harvest
- Stocking Up
- The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times
- Sonoran Desert Food Plants
- Southwest Foraging: 117 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Barrel Cactus to Wild Oregano
- Foraging the Rocky Mountains
- Foraging New England
(If your region isn’t listed here, I strongly recommend you search for a local guide to foraging)
Health
- Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine
- Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health
- The Bathroom Key
- Essential Oils Natural Remedies
- PDR for Herbal Medicines
- Herbal Medicine for Pets
- EMT textbook (Very expensive but potentially great information)
- Herbal Antibiotics
- Medicinal Plants of the American Southwest
Self-sufficiency
- Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World
- Back to Basics: How to Learn and Enjoy Traditional American Skills (Note from Daisy – I could only find this book used on Amazon, so this link is to the various used-book listings.)
- The Lost Ways
- Sewing Books by Kerstin Martensson (Note from Daisy) There are dozens of these guides that could open a whole new world of preparedness.)
- The Foxfire Series (Note from Daisy: This is a link to the entire series – but it’s kind of expensive. If you want to pick and choose, you can find many of the individual books on these 9 pages of listings.)
- The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It
- Ultimate Guide to Farm Mechanics: A Practical How-to Guide for the Farmer (compiled from books published in 1884, 1903, and 1922)
Philosophy/Mental Preparedness
- Man’s Search for Meaning
- Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America (Warning: This is very politically incorrect and talks about the balkanization of the US mostly based on ethnic/racial division as one of his major predictions)
- Mere Christianity
-
Financial Peace (This is the most recent edition)
-
A set of songbooks with melodies, lyrics, and chords for folk music, music from Broadway, hymnal, etc. to an individual’s taste – music can be very uplifting in trying times.
-
The Bible (KJV)
- Principles of Personal Defense
- Comprehensive Concealed Carry: 10 Tips to Defend Yourself, Stay Safe, Gear up, and Get Your First CCW, Fast
Do you have books to add?
Share them in the comments section below. Coming soon – the Prepper’s Fiction Library!
(Caroline, Karen, Erin, Susan, Walter, Lester, Mimi, John, Karen, Heather, Lisa, Julie, Ted, Tiffany, and David: Thank you for your contributions! )
The Homesteading Handbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More (The Handbook Series) & other books on by Abigail R. Gehring…
Ball’s Blue Book of Canning
Ball’s Blue Book of Preserving
Hi Daisy ,
I forgot to list this as well !!
John Whitehead is a true patriot !!
Thank’s , BD
Your Boy Scout manual link gives the 1911 edition (probably a reprint ). There are more recent editions.
I did not find The Lost Ways useful felt it was a waste of money. More hype than help.
I went to order that book about 6 months ago, but after reading the reviews I changed my mind.
What reviews? The ones on Amazon? Those are not real because the book is listed at $200. I emailed Claude and he answered right away with the real price. I love the book. I have the second one too!
No, I bought The Lost Ways. Terrible book.
I have The Lost Ways and loved it!
I liked Gene Logsdon’s book, Small-Scale Grain Raising.
His one on manure is not only funny but good too.
A couple of non-fiction suggestions:
Keeping the Harvest by Nancy Chioffi and Gretchen Mead,
The Everything Guide to Living Off the Grid by Terri Reid,
The Self-Sufficiency Handbook by Alan and Gill Bridgewater,
Emergency Food Storage and Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton.
I’d also like to suggest my own novel series for the fiction series: Olduvai.
All the best to all.
Two More Nonfiction Suggestions:
Dare to Prepare 5th Edition Written By Holly Drennan Deyo…The author is also in the process of creating a 6th Edition for this book (See http://www.standeyo.com/Our_Books/DTP.html)
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Living by Abigail R. Gehring
These are free and full of useful tidbits for establishing a self-resiliant homestead/community…
http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/PDC_ALL.pdf
Daisy, there are a lot of situations where it’s a good idea to create a printed book. If the “book” that you bought was in Kindle ebook format (or any other ebook format), there’s a way to take screenshots (cropped if you learn how) with free versions of software from Gadwin PrintScreen (I still use v4.5) that will sequentially number the page images you make, so printing them out in order via a duplex printer (that prints on the front and back of each piece of paper, which saves enormously on the amount of paper you use, AND the shelf storage space needed) becomes easy and automatic. Sometimes the book is available ONLY in ebook format — which may not do you much good in a long term power outage. Sometimes the ebook format was all you could afford. In any case, this is a personal backup process, and not something where you intend to resell and commit copyright infringement.
The reverse of this has its uses as well. You may have an enormous printed book library that’s way beyond taking with you if you need to suddenly evacuate, whether that’s a bugout, or even a move offshore. So how to cope? There is a world wide community of DIY book digitizers from experts all the way down to hopeful wannabees at:
http://diybookscanner.org/
where you can learn how to make your own book digitizer, with a wide range of designs — some fast, some slow, some pricey, some dirt cheap, with the usual tradeoffs. Some of them even show up on YouTube. The ability to make digital versions of the books that you already have — so you can put hundreds, or even thousands of them, on a tiny cheap flash drive to take with you — is astounding. And remember, there are solar battery chargers to keep a laptop running anywhere in the world.
–Lewis
Carla Emery’s Encyclopedia of Country Living. It even tells you how to deliver a baby by yourself. My inspiration!
The Lost Ways is good. And the second one as well
I really enjoy your site. I learn an awful lot , sometimes even about things I didn’t know I needed to know about.
I try to use “Print Friendly” to download a copy of many of your articles that I want on hand if/when the power goes out. Unfortunately, as with this article, a large portion doesn’t get printed.
Is there any chance that the site can be made more “download” friendly?
I’m so sorry! I’ll work on this, Akos 🙂
Much appreciated.
Dare to Prepare by Holly Dayo. Over 600 pages of pure knowledge. It covers almost everything. It is an expensive book on its 6th addition but you can find the 5th addition used on Amazon for $40.
The Non-Electric Lighting Series:
Book #1 CANDLES
Book #2 OLIVE OIL LAMPS
Book #3 LAMP FUELS
Book #4 KEROSENE LAMPS
Book #5 COLEMAN GAS LANTERNS
Book #6 KEROSENE PRESSURE LANTERNS
Book #7 PROPANE FOE PREPPERS
Book #8 ALCOHOL MANTLE LAMPS
THE NEW 2000-HOUR FLASHLIGHT
The Non-Electric Lighting Series is available on Amazon in both paper and Kindle format.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+non-electric+lighting+series&i=digital-text&crid=23P8NFM7U6MAL&sprefix=the+non-electric%2Cdigital-text%2C158&ref=nb_sb_ss_fb_1_16
Ollie’s Discount is a great place to pick up books on prepping cheap.
Link?
The Survival Medicine Handbook by Dr. Joseph Alton and Amy Alton APRN. And in this book, they recommend Where There is No Dentist.
Also, The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies by Nicole Apelian and Claude Davis.