In her wonderful essay collection, Anne Fadiman discusses the "odd shelf" in her book collection - titles on the Arctic and Antarctica. I had no interest in cold weather books when I was younger and wasn't even too excited about them after I moved to Alaska. I stumbled into the north in graduate school, where there was no degree in history but there was one in Northern Studies. I took classes on the literature of polar exploration and images of the north and human adaption to the north.
It really was way more interesting than it sounds!
My odd shelf developed as I was working on my thesis and started looking for every book on bush pilots I could find. Along the way I read a lot about men in the frozen north and frozen south. I don't know when "ice" books began to fill a shelf, or spill over onto another, but they are now my thing it seems, and when I find a new title I am absurdly excited.
This past week has given me something truly cool to read on the subject: a daily blog entry over at Powells from Kelly Tyler Lewis, author of The Lost Men. In her entries she explains not only how she came to write a book about the other members of Shackleton's famous attempt to cross Antarctica, ("The first day, then, was in 1994, when I turned to chapter XIII, page 244 of a first edition of Shackleton's book South — "the fortunes and misfortunes of the Ross Sea party and the Aurora." Facing page 271 was a photograph of the men, uniformed and expectant in 1914, and I wondered, "Who are you?" That was the beginning."), but also how she researched it. It sounds like the perfect combination of what I love most - historical research and polar history. Her blog entries are really interesting and while I was already sold on the book just from its subject her intimate way of sharing how she found this story and fell in love with it is making it irresistible. I just finished reading a big round of cold weather books (for an essay over at Eclectica) but I'm already yearning for this one as well.
It's a sickness, I know, but it's my sickness. My own little personal odd shelf sickness. Now go read Kelly's blog entries, I promise you'll love them.
