Mountainfit

April 9th, 2012 | Meera

Hello there. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked with you, but part of that is because of the news I’d like to share today.

Some of you may remember that last year I started a Kickstarter project to help me publish a little book about my time as a volunteer in Sweden at Lake Ånnsjön Bird Observatory. That book is finally finished. It ended up being called Mountainfit, and it bears an unbelievably lovely Diana Sudyka-designed cover.

I created a very limited print run for Kickstarter backers and the observatory; otherwise the book only exists in digital form.

I’ve made the ebook available for purchase directly through this website. $5 will let you download a copy in three formats: ePUB, MOBI, and PDF. And it will present you with a collection of short essays—some as brief as a page and some as long as sixteen—about birds, science, myth, and the mountains of Sweden.

Female Great Snipe

This is Raymond Klaassen with a Great Snipe, a bird about which I say quite a lot in the book.

I am a poor saleswoman, but if you’re a Science Essayist reader or you follow my Tumblr project 366 Days of Words in Science,* you probably already have a pretty good sense of whether you’ll like this book or not.

I did decide that while I was telling you about it here, I’d also include the table of contents from Mountainfit, because I know that when I pick up a strange book in the library or a bookstore, chapter titles are often a good way of getting a little peek into its style and content.

Here is the Mountainfit TOC:

the trapeze artist, the cuckoo, and me
claim your area
field notes from a lost lek
the idea of joy
the language of the birds
where the kría swarm
the werewolf possibility
to see a hooded crow with its cowl thrown over its head
the world’s sweetest double-cross
things often heard
different ways of agreeing and disagreeing
seasonal plumage
a good lemming year
mountainfit
being king solomon
the gyr is a gyr
the vagrant in sweden
appendix: an incomplete list of birds that have appeared in this book, along with ways of naming them
about, etc.
selected references

I think that’s it! You can buy a copy of Mountainfit here. And as is always, always true, I thank you so much for reading.

*Since January 1, 2012, I’ve been keeping a daily word-diary at 366 Days of Words in Science. Each post contains the definition of a scientific word, a photograph I took that day, and a tiny piece of something else: something personal, usually. So far it’s been incredibly fun for me to work on, although it’s true that every night after dinner I groan theatrically and say to Ross, “AGH, I haven’t found a word yet.” So far, there are 99 words in the series. I’ll stop when I get to 366—which will probably be in the middle of March, 2013, because I’m taking a break from electricity this summer to volunteer with the Fish and Wildlife Service in western Alaska.
This entry was posted on April 9th, 2012 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Mountainfit”

  1. Anya Weber says:
    April 9, 2012 at 6:14 pm

    It arrived today! Excited to check it out. Congrats on completing and publishing it!

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