Two Book Things I Want To Share With You All

Howdy All!

There're two pretty worthwhile things on my mind tonight that I'd like to share with you all.

First of all, I'm not a first year student (and have not been for some time now) but I still usually try to at least take a "more than passing glance" at the books that are chosen each year to be the First Year Student's Book of the Year. Its a good NKU program. Essentially, the idea is that all freshmen should be mostly in low level classes their first year so the First Year Students program gives out a certain book, arranges to have that book's author come to campus near the end of the school year and then facilitates the book being worked into classroom curricula throughout the low level class classes that most freshman would be taking. The end result is that the first year students tend to have very strong, intercurricular experiences with whichever book has been chosen for them that year. The books chosen tend to have some ongoing social significance and are usually fairly contemporary. Nickel and Dimed was one from a couple of years ago. Another was Autobiography of a Face. Both are very good books.

The book chosen for the 2007-08 school year is Lost Mountain by Erik Reece. I hadn't heard much about it (as I'm not really running in that circle these days since I don't work at the Learning Center any more) until my local Barnes & Noble started stocking it. They had been jokingly trying to pander it off on me for a couple of weeks, but I hadn't really paid much attention about it until my geography professor mentioned "sites of mountain top removal" on GoogleEarth. Though he didn't mention the book by name, the dots connected for me and, when I looked up the sites on GoogleEarth, my interest was piqued. I stopped at BN and read 50 pages of Lost Mountain tonight and it's good - really good actually - but I'm not going to buy it until I find out if I can snag a free one on campus.

Lost Mountain, in a nutshell, is about the ecological and economic woes brought about within Appalachia (specifically Eastern Kentucky) by a particularly nasty form of strip mining called "mountaintop removal" as the author visits what was once a real place called Lost Mountain monthly over the course of a year. For you readers, its a pretty fair hybrid of Silent Spring and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that mixes a strong sense of natural awareness (ala Thoreau or Dillard) with a good sense of social and ecological consciousness (ala Carson and Mowat.)

I can't vouch for the whole book yet obviously (because I haven't read it all) but I can say that, providing he doesn't take a sharp turn toward the terrible, I think it is pretty safe to say that this is something noteworthy for most people, especially those of us from this area.

If you are interested in reading more "official" information about the book, you can click here.

The second thing I wanted to tell you about is something that has grown pretty dear to me over the last several months. In Spring 07, I took a class at NKU on Men and Women of the 18th Century. It was a 400+ level English course with Professor Roxanne Kent-Drury and I only took it really to fill a needed class requirement. I had already taken several modern British Lit. courses and a couple of Renaissance Brit. Lit. too, so Restoration / Enlightenment seemed to be a black hole in my literature background. It was okay.

But one of the assignments that Roxanne had for us was to edit and footnote one poem from a Renaissance Women's poetry anthology that she has been editting for the last few years. The anthology was originally published in 1781 and has not been republished since and so she has been working to create a critical edition of it by assigning one poem at a time to her students in all her classes. It was a viable method of doing the work except that it wasn't going fast enough, so she offered up independent, graduate level courses for interested students over the past summer to each take a poet and closely edit her. I signed up.

I chose my poet to be Mary Leapor not knowing anything about her. My portion of the overall anthology would be just over 120 pages, the largest single section of the book, but I figured, honestly, if I was taking this for a graduate level credit, this would help to pad my resume as well as situate me in good favor toward being accepted toward a fair graduate school, but I have to admit that I became fairly smitten with Mary Leapor over the course of the summer. She was a maid, reasonably low born and never lived to see any of her poems published (something which her employer / friend and her father undertook after her death,) but her wit and sensibility make her fairly accessible to the common reader. She was well read and quite literate for her time but her life was overshadowed with sadness: she never married and died at an extremely young age.

My project with Mary Leapor is, essentially, over now but the work on the anthology continues through this semester as I and another student have now signed on to generally edit the whole anthology and prepare it for publication. Unfortunately, our work, as it is an ongoing project, is not ready for public dissemination at this time however I can offer links to online .pdf's of Mary Leapor's work. I hope anyone reading this takes a few minutes of your day to download one of the two .pdf's (either is quite good) and give her poetry a fair try. I won't tell you that they are easy. It's 18th Century Literature and, as such, it's pretty dense by our normal standards, but I DO think that she is worthwhile and merits, if nothing else, a few minutes of your time.

If you are interested in reading more about Mary Leapor, you can use the links below:

• Mary Leapor (Wikipedia)
• Mary Leapor's Poems Upon Several Occasions Volume 1 & Volume 2

Both of the above files are quite large and may take several minutes to download and then initialize, but I encourage you, especially if you are already inclinded toward literature and / or poetry to sample through them, if for no other reason, the excitement of reading the books as they originally looked when they were published in 1748 and 1751 respectively.