Reading

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Book Review: The Man Who Ate His Boots by Anthony Brandt, narr. Simon Vance

Title: The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
Author: Anthony Brandt
Narrator: Simon Vance
Published: Random House Audio, 2010
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 450
Total Page Count: 537,540
Text Number: 1968
Read Because: this cold boys reading list, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: My first delve into the Franklin expedition, so maybe my opinion will alter as I learn more, but this was a fantastic introduction. As much about the background to the expedition (why Franklin, why these other players, why the Northwest Passage) as the expedition itself, and in fact largely unconcerned with positing clever explanations for its failure (explanations are all but implied by the catalog of near-failures on record from prior expeditions), this is fairly exhaustive without being stodgy, and its efforts to characterize both the people involved and the fatal British preoccupation with the Northwest Passage achieves a satisfying nuance, a thorough why that still allows for "but why, tho."

Simon Vance is a prolific audiobook narrator, granted; when he began "after the Napoleonic War, the British had a lot of navy personnel out of work" all I could think was, were there dragons, Simon, did they have dragons? (It would have helped a lot with the search for the Passage!)

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Book Review: Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.

Title: Who Goes There?
Author: John W. Campbell Jr.
Published: Wildside Press, 2022 (1938)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 537,090
Text Number: 1967
Read Because: these boys are cold but it's fiction now (pop culture depictions of the Antarctic came up in "Placing Women in the Antarctic Literary Landscape" by Elizabeth Leane), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This make the adaptation look like a masterwork, scaling back the technobabble, landing on iconic images, preserving the important thrust of the plot. But I still enjoyed this! Campbell's prose is delightfully overwritten, for better ("No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet’s natural forces and survive.") and worse (the flamethrower scene); dialog is no exception. And yet, the premise endures, and the bombast suits the Antarctic, the social tensions, the terror of the unknown, of contagion. Unique to the original story is that until threatened with harm, the thing passes as, it entirely is whatever it's shaped itself to be; scarier than the uncanny is the total conviction of a man the moment before he turns out to be a monster. Let Golden Age SF try too hard, okay? It's more fun than obnoxious.

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Book Review: To the South Polar Regions by Louis Bernacchi

Title: To the South Polar Regions: Expedition of 1898–1900
Author: Louis Bernacchi
Published: Hurst and Blackett, 1901
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 537,050
Text Number: 1966
Read Because: these boys are just so cold, borrowed from Open Library
Review: Bernacchi is one of the better writers in my travelog readings: funny, with a dark bent, managing evocative and informative depiction both of the sweeping grandeur of Antarctica and the gripes of close-quarters and rough living. But readers picking this up because Bernacchi "was critical of aspects of Borchgrevink's leadership" (as per Wikipedia) may be disappointed by his understated criticism. Bernacchi is subdued, bordering on passive aggressive: he's frank about the conditions at Camp Adare, but Borchgrevink is notable largely for his absence, rarely mentioned, a quiet dismissal noticeable particularly when Bernacchi contradicts Borchgrevink's version of events. The Southern Cross expedition is largely forgotten, for reasons both unfair and actually quite fair. The sequence of events is a lot of nerd talk (admirable, but not especially engaging) and frustrated, failed excursions; this is a skippable, slipshod cold mess of an expedition, not especially distinctive or memorably tragic, vaguely embarrassing, despite Bernacchi's honesty. Predictably, I still enjoyed it, especially when the accounts are contrasted.

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Book Review: First on the Antarctic Continent by C.E. Borchgrevink

Title: First on the Antarctic Continent: Being an Account of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898–1900
Author: C.E. Borchgrevink
Published: George Newnes, 1901
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 536,670
Text Number: 1965
Read Because: these boys are just so cold, borrowed from Open Library
Review: The first "British"(-funded) Antarctic expedition, and the first to overwinter on land, among other accomplishments, as told by the commander. This is imminently skippable and, yet like most polar memoirs, fascinating, albeit rarely for intended reasons. This expedition is remarkable for being poorly planned, and the location poorly chosen, which makes other expeditions look more successful by contrast. Given the inimical setting, Borchgrevink's slipshod focus on research and slew of manufactured adventures feel almost comically blithe, although his tone isn't as insufferable as I was lead to believe; it's only in contemporary context (the Southern Cross expedition was considered a competitor to the upcoming Discovery expedition) and in the differences of opinion in Bernacchi's memoir that "insufferable" makes sense. Do skip this one unless reading also Bernacchi, mostly because Bernacchi is funnier with this as a counterpoint.

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Book Review: Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Title: Calling on Dragons (Enchanted Forest Chronicles 3)
Author: Patricia C. Wrede
Published: HMH Books for Young Readers, 2015 (1993)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 245
Total Page Count: 536,270
Text Number: 1964
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The witch Morwen leads a ragtag group to save the Enchanted Forest from wizards. Familiar premise, indeed; what differentiates it is the PoV; and I like Morwen, but we don't learn much about her and her clowder of talking cats runs into all number of cat-related tropes that I don't enjoy. I also don't like the new comic relief character. Or the ongoing Telemain communication gimmick, and all of these are running gags, and that's a lot of running gags to find frustrating in one short book. This didn't work for me, and it feels, even more than its predecessor, like it's just a setup for a "real" book.

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Book Review: Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898-1899 by Frederick A. Cook

Title: Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898-1899
Author: Frederick A. Cook
Published: 1900
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 520
Total Page Count: 536,025
Text Number: 1963
Read Because: I have Problems; Project Gutenberg has this one
Review: This is the first primary source that I feel like has not appreciably added to my understanding of Antarctic exploration, in that, between Sancton's Madhouse at the End of the Earth and Guly's papers, particularly "'Polar anaemia': cardiac failure during the heroic age of Antarctic exploration", I'd already read the good bits, and better contextualized than in Cook's direct account. What's left is a fairly uninspired narration with repetitious but, worse, often ineffective meditations on the Antarctic atmosphere. There's not much insight into the human factor even as regards Cook himself, the fascinating period medical understandings are better analyzed elsewhere, and while it's a glimpse into Cook's narrative style, that style is scattershot and unreliable. Eminently skippable, but given that accessible Belgica resources are thin on the ground, I'm not mad I read it.

(FWIW, Arçtowski's narratives are more spread out and obviously weighted towards science, but I still liked them more: that bias and brevity makes the peeks of a distinctive sarcastic voice, the foibles of the expedition, and the polar atmosphere all feel better chosen and more valuable.)