Recent reading
Sep. 20th, 2019 10:05 pmExpeditionen - min kärlekshistoria by Bea Uusma (2013)
Title means "The Expedition - My Love Story". This is only available in Swedish, which is sad, because I know that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
isis and rachelmanija, among others, would have enjoyed it. Bea Uusma is a fandom-of-one for the Andrée polar expedition, and her enthusiasm really shines through in the book. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of how the expedition members died, going through various theories and finding new evidence herself. The narrative voice is really engaging and is mixed with quotes from the expedition journals.
This expedition is pretty ridiculous. Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen, Andrée is an engineer with no previous polar experience. He takes along two other engineers and plans to fly across the Arctic in a balloon at a time when no balloon has been in the air more than 24 hours. Andrée calculates that their balloon will be able to fly for 30 days. They do not even test-fly it. It lasts for 65 hours before it goes down on the ice. The three men travel across the ice on sleds that they brought along as reserve equipment. The sleds are very heavy, as they bring along ridiculous things like encyclopedias. Their bodies and the sleds are found on a tiny Arctic island in 1930, and theories about their deaths range from trichinosis to lead-poisoning to freezing to death. Uusma finds none of these believable and constructs her own theory.
Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017, #3 in the Green Earth trilogy)
This book is about climate change and parliamentary politics. It is sad that it should feel like an impossible utopia that the US could have a president who took climate change seriously. : / Any KSR book is worth reading to me, but this is not one of my favorites. ( The spoilery reasons why I was underwhelmed by this book. )
Title means "The Expedition - My Love Story". This is only available in Swedish, which is sad, because I know that
isis and rachelmanija, among others, would have enjoyed it. Bea Uusma is a fandom-of-one for the Andrée polar expedition, and her enthusiasm really shines through in the book. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of how the expedition members died, going through various theories and finding new evidence herself. The narrative voice is really engaging and is mixed with quotes from the expedition journals. This expedition is pretty ridiculous. Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen, Andrée is an engineer with no previous polar experience. He takes along two other engineers and plans to fly across the Arctic in a balloon at a time when no balloon has been in the air more than 24 hours. Andrée calculates that their balloon will be able to fly for 30 days. They do not even test-fly it. It lasts for 65 hours before it goes down on the ice. The three men travel across the ice on sleds that they brought along as reserve equipment. The sleds are very heavy, as they bring along ridiculous things like encyclopedias. Their bodies and the sleds are found on a tiny Arctic island in 1930, and theories about their deaths range from trichinosis to lead-poisoning to freezing to death. Uusma finds none of these believable and constructs her own theory.
Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017, #3 in the Green Earth trilogy)
This book is about climate change and parliamentary politics. It is sad that it should feel like an impossible utopia that the US could have a president who took climate change seriously. : / Any KSR book is worth reading to me, but this is not one of my favorites. ( The spoilery reasons why I was underwhelmed by this book. )
