My Reading List for 01/21/10

Hello! Good mornin', y'all. Anywho, I completed my reading of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Today I'm starting on the sequel to that classic book-- The Pioneers. In TLOTM, Natty/Hawk-eye is a young man in his thirties. In The Pioneers, he is an old man in his seventies. Here, Natty is swept up in the early days of Westward expansion from the New England colonies to the Middle colonies, particularly the land that would become New York State, where New Jersey-born Cooper lived most of his life. As he did in TLOTM, the hyper-literate author prefaces each chapter with quotes from the great thinkers, philosophers, and writers of the past. (It amazes me that writers and political figures of Cooper's time, many of whom had little to no formal education, were such autodidacts, or self-taught scholars.) BTW, in my last "My Reading List for..." post, I mentioned that Cooper began writing by accident. Well, actually, he wrote his first novel (this is according to the most recent research)-- Precaution (1820)-- in order to support himself after his well-to-do family's fortune ran out. Older versions of Cooper's autobiography suggest that he began writing in order to outdo a certain British female contemporary, whom I'm presuming is either Jane Austen or Mary Ann Evans a.k.a. George Eliot. (Ms. Evans/Eliot adopted a masculine nom de plume in order to be taken seriously. Imagine that-- talk about a sign o' the times!) As for The Pioneers itself, it, like so many other works of 19th-century American literature, is well worth your time and effort. Although these books are 200 years old, many of their themes are timeless. So, curl up with a good cup of coffee with a dash of Cooper.