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Print Immediate confession: I am not the proverbial bookworm. I just grew up with books around me and thought that everyone loved them the way that I did. But as a senior in high school, I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (by James Joyce) and The Sound and The Fury (by William Faulkner), and somewhere something clicked. I could never look at books the same after that because I knew what they were capable of. Rebel that I am, in my Junior year at Louisiana State University I changed my major from Pre-Dentistry to a double major in History and English with a concentration in literature. I also started working for the United States Civil War Center where I was able to get my first hands-on experience with publishing—I contributed annotations to the Civil War Book Review. (Ever tried to review a book in twenty words or less? Not as easy as it sounds.) After graduation and a lot of God moments, things fell into place for me to enter the graduate program at Southeastern Louisiana University. I like to say that I went there to help with the campus ministry and God threw in my M.A. in Literature as a bonus. It was a wonderful two years. I had the incredible fortune of working as Editorial Assistant of Nineteenth Century Studies, an interdisciplinary journal of book and exhibition reviews as well as journal articles on every imaginable aspect of the 1800s. Have you ever read an article packed with tedious facts and statistics and wondered to yourself who spent hours in a dim library researching those statistics and verifying their accuracy? Okay, probably not. But I was that girl. I had a blast checking quotes in a tiny carrel surrounded by musty books I’m sure no one but me has cracked open in the last 40 years. Though I had planned to pursue a career in teaching and research at the university level, somewhere along the way I decided to swim in the waters of Corporate America. That was a short year and a half ago, and I’m now working at a software firm. My title lately is Communications Specialist, which means that I do everything from proposal writing to system documentation to managing our sales presentation. It has been a demanding transition, and I’m enjoying the challenges that the business track provides. I must confess, however, that along the way, I’ve opted for sleep over reading. Somehow the college two-in-a-row-all-nighters just aren’t what they used to be—part of the transition to the “real world” they tell me. But I’m battling my way back to a more literate lifestyle. So what are my literary interests? I’m a twentieth-century American literature junkie, no two ways about it. In fact, all you hard core English majors will probably have Hemmingway-like fits of depression over my apparent neglect of British lit. Well, the truth is that I did work for a brilliant scholar of the Victorian era. So don’t despair, we’ll talk Dickens and Wilde. But I was also privileged to study under one of the premier Eudora Welty scholars and biographers. So though I like it all, I adore American literature, specifically Southern women writers. In a perfect life, my third book would be an analysis of the new Southern woman in the works of Welty and Flannery O’Connor. But alas, the world is too much with us, as someone said. What else? I attend the First Pentecostal Church in Denham Springs, Louisiana where I’ve lived my entire life. I assist on the youth committee and serve as a facilitator in the college and career class. Like every good Pentecostal I also try to do the music thing—in this case leading acoustic worship in youth services once a month and singing on praise teams/choir. Basically, I try to be involved in everything possible because church is what gives my life value. Elsewhere, I’ve always been obsessed with fishing plus my family raises horses, so now that it’s November in Louisiana and the temperature is almost out of the 80s, I’m trying to take my life out of doors (and hopefully bring along a book). As far as this column goes, I intend to celebrate great books with you. We will typically explore commentary on the latest book news, individual book reviews, a Classic remembered, and a blurb on a book for fun. Like the rest of 90&9, this column can best be enriched by your input, so please contact me. Free Books! We have some cool plans to expand our book reviews to include new releases of Christian literature. If you might be interested in reading and reviewing Christian fiction or nonfiction, please contact us for more information. I look forward to turning pages with you.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2004 Lee Ann Alexander
----------- Lee Ann Alexander will be writing ninetyandnine.com’s new book column every month until they stop printing books. (When you sign up with us, you sign up for life.)
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