Something to Remember Wednesday
Jan. 18th, 2017 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, a rec fromk_t_bug which fulfills one of my reading challenges for 2017: Read a book about Antarctica. I finished this in about two days; every time I got to the end of a short chapter I would think, "Ok, just one more!" and so on until I fell asleep. It's the story of the aftermath of a failed Antarctic expedition: the plan was to cross Antarctica by dogsled, but the ship (the Endurance) never made it to Antarctica in the first place. Instead, it was trapped in pack ice and drifted for months until the ice finally crushed it. This was in 1914; there was no radio transmitter, no way to contact the rest of the world, and no way for rescuers to reach them in any case. Astonishingly, the crew did not die of hypothermia but lived, in bad health and extreme discomfort, camping on the pack ice until it broke up under them, eventually reaching an uninhabited island in their three lifeboats and having to wait there for a small team to sail for help to the most accessible human settlement, a whaling station eight hundred miles away.
Like The Count of Monte Cristo, this is one of those books that made me want to re-narrate everything that happens to anyone will listen. Because you all are lucky enough not to live with me, you have been spared the excruciatingly detailed blow-by-blow of what's happening with "my guys on the ice" and their rotting sleeping bags and their heated arguments about which blessedly non-frozen non-meat food they are going to eat first when they get back to civilization. It was impossible not to be invested even though the author told me at the beginning that they were all going to make it out alive. I cried as much when the guys finally set foot on Elephant Island as I did when Apollo 13 made it back to Earth. Never mind that Elephant Island is a howling tornado magnet, it's real land! Made of rocks! Their first in over a year!
All the men made it out alive, I should say. The dogs were shot - not all at once, but in stages, having lived long enough to save the day on multiple occasions and form bonds with the crew, the way dogs do. By the time the crew took to the open boats, the dogs were all dead. A ship's cat who was never meant to do anything but ride around on the ship was also eventually shot.
This is a miserable story about waiting around for months and being thwarted at every turn, but instead of making me miserable it was exciting and suspenseful. It's also a story of the Old Anatarctic, of a half-frozen sea teeming with whales and seals and plankton, and it's melancholy to read it now, over a hundred years later, when so many ecosystems are in collapse.
What I'm Reading Now
In The Hidden Land, things are getting serious - the king has been killed, despite the cousins' best efforts, and Ted (whom everyone in the kingdom still thinks is his fictional self-insert, Prince Edward) has just been crowned king. This involves having a lot of people swear fealty to him, and there's one of Pamela Dean's odd, likable digressions about how uncomfortable this makes him - because his name in the game is the same as his name in the "real world," he doesn't want his cousins taking the oath to serve "Edward" and insists on them specifying that it's only in his capacity as King of the Hidden Land. His scrupulousness is sympathetic, and so is their impatience with him. War is coming - shouldn't they try to get back to their own world? Can they?
And a couple of other things, but I'll get to them next week.
What I'm Reading Next
I'm no further along in my plan to make a list of previous recs, or in my "two books from every continent" goal, but I've gotten some good recommendations for "genres I don't usually read": a memoir fromosprey_archer and tons of romance from wordsofastory. I'm going to add a genre for myself: YA dystopia, represented by The Hunger Games. I bought the Hunger Games soundtrack a couple of weeks ago on impulse at a library book sale, and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted to listen to at this moment in history. The books may be nothing like the soundtrack, but I am going to give them a try anyway.
I'm still trying to "read down" my bookshelves and make more space. I might read one of the 99 Novels I already own: either Falstaff by Robert Nye or A Confederacy of Dunces. I'm saving Catch-22 and Kingsley Amis' Anti-Death League for later because I'm expecting to like them more (possibly a mistake).
What I've Finished Reading
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, a rec from
k_t_bug which fulfills one of my reading challenges for 2017: Read a book about Antarctica. I finished this in about two days; every time I got to the end of a short chapter I would think, "Ok, just one more!" and so on until I fell asleep. It's the story of the aftermath of a failed Antarctic expedition: the plan was to cross Antarctica by dogsled, but the ship (the Endurance) never made it to Antarctica in the first place. Instead, it was trapped in pack ice and drifted for months until the ice finally crushed it. This was in 1914; there was no radio transmitter, no way to contact the rest of the world, and no way for rescuers to reach them in any case. Astonishingly, the crew did not die of hypothermia but lived, in bad health and extreme discomfort, camping on the pack ice until it broke up under them, eventually reaching an uninhabited island in their three lifeboats and having to wait there for a small team to sail for help to the most accessible human settlement, a whaling station eight hundred miles away.Like The Count of Monte Cristo, this is one of those books that made me want to re-narrate everything that happens to anyone will listen. Because you all are lucky enough not to live with me, you have been spared the excruciatingly detailed blow-by-blow of what's happening with "my guys on the ice" and their rotting sleeping bags and their heated arguments about which blessedly non-frozen non-meat food they are going to eat first when they get back to civilization. It was impossible not to be invested even though the author told me at the beginning that they were all going to make it out alive. I cried as much when the guys finally set foot on Elephant Island as I did when Apollo 13 made it back to Earth. Never mind that Elephant Island is a howling tornado magnet, it's real land! Made of rocks! Their first in over a year!
All the men made it out alive, I should say. The dogs were shot - not all at once, but in stages, having lived long enough to save the day on multiple occasions and form bonds with the crew, the way dogs do. By the time the crew took to the open boats, the dogs were all dead. A ship's cat who was never meant to do anything but ride around on the ship was also eventually shot.
This is a miserable story about waiting around for months and being thwarted at every turn, but instead of making me miserable it was exciting and suspenseful. It's also a story of the Old Anatarctic, of a half-frozen sea teeming with whales and seals and plankton, and it's melancholy to read it now, over a hundred years later, when so many ecosystems are in collapse.
What I'm Reading Now
In The Hidden Land, things are getting serious - the king has been killed, despite the cousins' best efforts, and Ted (whom everyone in the kingdom still thinks is his fictional self-insert, Prince Edward) has just been crowned king. This involves having a lot of people swear fealty to him, and there's one of Pamela Dean's odd, likable digressions about how uncomfortable this makes him - because his name in the game is the same as his name in the "real world," he doesn't want his cousins taking the oath to serve "Edward" and insists on them specifying that it's only in his capacity as King of the Hidden Land. His scrupulousness is sympathetic, and so is their impatience with him. War is coming - shouldn't they try to get back to their own world? Can they?
And a couple of other things, but I'll get to them next week.
What I'm Reading Next
I'm no further along in my plan to make a list of previous recs, or in my "two books from every continent" goal, but I've gotten some good recommendations for "genres I don't usually read": a memoir from
osprey_archer and tons of romance from wordsofastory. I'm going to add a genre for myself: YA dystopia, represented by The Hunger Games. I bought the Hunger Games soundtrack a couple of weeks ago on impulse at a library book sale, and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted to listen to at this moment in history. The books may be nothing like the soundtrack, but I am going to give them a try anyway.I'm still trying to "read down" my bookshelves and make more space. I might read one of the 99 Novels I already own: either Falstaff by Robert Nye or A Confederacy of Dunces. I'm saving Catch-22 and Kingsley Amis' Anti-Death League for later because I'm expecting to like them more (possibly a mistake).
