Moving on, I've decided to tackle the classic, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans...
Image: Amazon.com
Note: This is not the exact cover I have, which I could not find; damn the Google.
Interesting point about Mr. Cooper, which I learned while reading the introduction, an introduction that proceeded to give away the entire plot so I had to stop reading it (Why do introductions do that? Not everyone has read the story.), was that his father settled Cooperstown, New York, home of the baseball hall of fame.
When I started the reading project, it was my goal to read all of the books I have in my house, although I have bought a few more along the way. Over the years, my wife and I had accumulated a bunch, but I had never actually read them, and now I'm trying to make use of them. They've mostly served as decoration.
I'm not sure if the Mohicans will survive, however (pun intended), since I have already found myself bored by the end of the first page, although it is difficult to switch gears and start a new book. I'm certainly going to give it a chance, and maybe it will last longer than John Fowles' trash.
This book was an assignment for a college course I had, and needless to say, I never read the book. Let me back up for a moment.
In college, I had a relatively strict curriculum at Syracuse, mostly engineering prerequisites the first two years, core engineering courses the third year, and elective engineering courses the fourth year. On top of that we needed six courses within the school of Arts & Sciences, what we called "throwaway classes." I was able to turn two of the six courses into one of my two minors, but the other four were random, and there was nothing I could do to make use of them. One of those was "English Textual Studies: U.S. Literary History through 1860," a course they currently do not offer. The course covered early American writers, including Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Apess, etc., and one of the books we read was -- you guessed it -- The Last of the Mohicans.
Considering that this course was one of my throwaway classes, I jogged through it, and ended up getting a 'B' or something. Life goes on. But now I am going to try and read the novel, although I admit early American writers using the British writing-style of the time does not excite me.
I'll see how I'm feeling after a chapter or two, and as always, I'll report back.
Labels: baseball, google, reading, syracuse
