The Science Essayist

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.

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.