Recent reading
Sep. 20th, 2019 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaExpeditionen - 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 thatisis 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. First: the romance. Frank and Caroline have spent very little time together. Basically they meet in an elevator and make out, then they're separared for most of the books because she has to go underground for spy reasons and they only meet up for short passionate interludes. And I mean short as in a few hours. Then at the end they get married and she's pregnant, and this is presented as a happy ending. Whoa, bad idea--they don't even know each other!
So, okay, the romance is not the major part of this book, but some of the climate change mitigation efforts also seem off to me. To pump water back onto the stable parts of Antarctica, enough to make a difference sea-level-wise, would take sooo much energy and resources that I just don't think are possible while you're also phasing out fossil fuels. And a bioengineered lichen that makes trees grow faster? Lichens are epiphytes, they're not in symbiosis with the trees. And even if they were, their algae couldn't make enough sugar to make a difference to the tree. If the algae have an improved photosynthesis somehow, why not do that to the tree in the first place?
Okay, I feel unfair to the book now, because I did enjoy a lot of it while I was reading it. It's just that the ending left me a bit grumpy.
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. First: the romance. Frank and Caroline have spent very little time together. Basically they meet in an elevator and make out, then they're separared for most of the books because she has to go underground for spy reasons and they only meet up for short passionate interludes. And I mean short as in a few hours. Then at the end they get married and she's pregnant, and this is presented as a happy ending. Whoa, bad idea--they don't even know each other!
So, okay, the romance is not the major part of this book, but some of the climate change mitigation efforts also seem off to me. To pump water back onto the stable parts of Antarctica, enough to make a difference sea-level-wise, would take sooo much energy and resources that I just don't think are possible while you're also phasing out fossil fuels. And a bioengineered lichen that makes trees grow faster? Lichens are epiphytes, they're not in symbiosis with the trees. And even if they were, their algae couldn't make enough sugar to make a difference to the tree. If the algae have an improved photosynthesis somehow, why not do that to the tree in the first place?
Okay, I feel unfair to the book now, because I did enjoy a lot of it while I was reading it. It's just that the ending left me a bit grumpy.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-20 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 08:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 05:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 08:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 11:38 am (UTC)Oh! You can't leave us hanging like that and tell us the punchline is only available in Swedish!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 02:35 pm (UTC)Her theory, based on how/where the skeletons were lying and information from their clothes, was that a polar bear attacked them and killed one of them (he was later buried by the others) and wounded another. The wounded man was put in his sleeping bag in the tent, where he later died. The third man died sitting outside the tent with a morphine bottle within reach, and Uusma thinks he committed suicide.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-23 04:21 pm (UTC)(But then I guess it's somewhat like filling out an official Cause of Death form -- you have to assign a single primary cause for legal/statistical purposes (and because human brains like simple answers) but in reality people tend to die of a whole mess of secondary/contributory causes too. Polar bears, yes, but also cold and inadequate diet and toxins and exhaustion and foolishness and non-standardised medications and who knows what else, and we look at all that and write "polar bear" on the form.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-24 07:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 05:19 pm (UTC)Anyway I need to read it in Swedish.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 05:26 pm (UTC)I think what I enjoyed about Uusma's book is that it's not just about those doomed incompetent men, but about them as filtered through Uusma's fannishness about them. Do read it.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-23 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-23 05:34 am (UTC)