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Reading Wednesday
Sep. 2nd, 2015 03:40 pmWhat did you just finish?
The Terror by Dan Simmons. The Franklin Expedition is fairly famous as one of the last attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage. The idea this time was to go north of Canada, because surely there was some way to push through the ice and get from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To that end, two sailing ships were supplied with steam engines to help push through ice, enough canned food (a fairly new and exciting invention at the time!) to feed everyone on board for five years, and other advanced naval technology. The idea was that even if they got frozen in place during the winters, they could simply wait until the next summer when the ice would melt, and then push through. 129 people left England with great fanfare in 1845.
No one survived.
Exactly what happened to them is still a mystery, given that a diary or log book (or any message at all, in fact, except for two very brief notes) has never been found. General consensus is that they were taken down by a combination of worse weather than anticipated and poor management, which then led to scurvy, lead poisoning, hypothermia, probably some cannibalism, abandoning the ships to get lost on land and pack ice, and ultimately starvation. (Interestingly, one of two abandoned ships was finally located last year, 2014, and has been investigated by underwater archaeologists, so we might have some more answers in the near future; the other ship is still lost, but presumably is not too far from the first, so we might find it soon as well.)
The Terror is an intensely researched novel about how all of this probably went down day by day, with the addition of a man-eating, intelligent polar bear. Well, what can I say? It was marketed as a horror novel, after all.
Despite the polar bear thing (which actually plays a much smaller part than I had anticipated), Simmons clearly has made a huge effort to be as accurate and precise as possible. For instance, he includes the word-for-word account of those two messages that have been found, and of the recovered bodies that have been identified in real life, he often makes sure the characters die in the right place and time in his plot. This can be frustrating, because it means that it's necessary for the characters to frequently make poor choices that led to terrible consequences. Sometimes it's simply not their fault – hey, germ theory didn't exist yet, so you can't really blame anyone for the awful medical treatment – and sometimes it's because it simply wasn't conceivable to them for the Royal British Navy to not be right about everything. Such as, say, wearing wet wool sweaters in temperatures of -50 F or worse, even though there are a bunch of Inuit around who are clearly much better dressed and supplied, why don't you just go take advice from them, argghhhh.
I mean, like, clearly this more or less did happen in real life. But it's still frustrating and I frequently wanted to shake them.
On a similar note, nearly all the characters are exactly as racist, sexist, and homophobic as you would expect a bunch of sailors in the mid-19th century to be. Although these views are eventually negated by the narrative, it can be irritating to spend hundreds of pages with racist statements just getting repeated over and over again. Not to mention that the main villain (who is ridiculously, mustache-twirling, over-the-top villainous) is one of the few gay characters.
But despite all of these complaints, I did quite like the book. I was vaguely aware of the Franklin expedition before starting, since I used to have a professor who was obsessed with it. The Terror is compelling and hard to put down, as things just keep getting worse and worse and worse for these people. It's not exactly scary – it's not the sort of book that will make you afraid to turn off the lights – but it is clearly part of the genre of "ill-prepared white people stumble into Native mythology that turns out to be more real and less myth". It's a fascinatingly detailed recreation of a specific time and place, and left me wanting to learn even more about the real life Franklin expedition. Recommended if 700 pages of nautical history mixed with giant monsters sounds like a good idea to you, especially if – like me – you are totally willing to believe that icy cold temperatures are inherently terrifying.
The Chili Cookbook: A History of the One-Pot Classic, with Cook-off Worthy Recipes from Three-Bean to Four-Alarm and Con Carne to Vegetarian by Robb Walsh. This book has far too much history and straightforward narrative to quite be a cookbook, but way too many recipes to be a non-fiction book. It's something in between. Which is kind of cool, actually, since I like both those genres. This book distinguishes itself from some of the other chili cookbooks out there by its focus on the history of chili and the many food traditions which have influenced it, which is an approach that I haven't seen before. It allows for some very different recipes, ranging from Aztec lobster and corn stew, to Hungarian goulash, to Greek makaronia me kima. Even when we've reached America, Walsh goes period by period, allowing you to see the different fads that have changed how we cook chili. (Although personally, I was more interested in these chapters for their historical value than because I plan on trying the recipes. I'm not cooking anything that has 'render tallow' as a step.)
I appreciated that Walsh doesn't take sides on many of the common chili debates. There are recipes here for chili with and without beans, an entire chapter of vegetarian chilis, as well as white and green and old-school red chilis. There are recipes as low-class as frito pie and coney dogs, and as fancy as chilis that incorporate short ribs, lamb, or mole sauce. I made the recipe called "Three-Bean Chipotle Chili" and confirm that it was as delicious as the pictures were lovely.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. Another NetGalley book, because I am way over the limit in the number of books I've requested, and need to get these reviews finished.
The Terror by Dan Simmons. The Franklin Expedition is fairly famous as one of the last attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage. The idea this time was to go north of Canada, because surely there was some way to push through the ice and get from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To that end, two sailing ships were supplied with steam engines to help push through ice, enough canned food (a fairly new and exciting invention at the time!) to feed everyone on board for five years, and other advanced naval technology. The idea was that even if they got frozen in place during the winters, they could simply wait until the next summer when the ice would melt, and then push through. 129 people left England with great fanfare in 1845.
No one survived.
Exactly what happened to them is still a mystery, given that a diary or log book (or any message at all, in fact, except for two very brief notes) has never been found. General consensus is that they were taken down by a combination of worse weather than anticipated and poor management, which then led to scurvy, lead poisoning, hypothermia, probably some cannibalism, abandoning the ships to get lost on land and pack ice, and ultimately starvation. (Interestingly, one of two abandoned ships was finally located last year, 2014, and has been investigated by underwater archaeologists, so we might have some more answers in the near future; the other ship is still lost, but presumably is not too far from the first, so we might find it soon as well.)
The Terror is an intensely researched novel about how all of this probably went down day by day, with the addition of a man-eating, intelligent polar bear. Well, what can I say? It was marketed as a horror novel, after all.
Despite the polar bear thing (which actually plays a much smaller part than I had anticipated), Simmons clearly has made a huge effort to be as accurate and precise as possible. For instance, he includes the word-for-word account of those two messages that have been found, and of the recovered bodies that have been identified in real life, he often makes sure the characters die in the right place and time in his plot. This can be frustrating, because it means that it's necessary for the characters to frequently make poor choices that led to terrible consequences. Sometimes it's simply not their fault – hey, germ theory didn't exist yet, so you can't really blame anyone for the awful medical treatment – and sometimes it's because it simply wasn't conceivable to them for the Royal British Navy to not be right about everything. Such as, say, wearing wet wool sweaters in temperatures of -50 F or worse, even though there are a bunch of Inuit around who are clearly much better dressed and supplied, why don't you just go take advice from them, argghhhh.
I mean, like, clearly this more or less did happen in real life. But it's still frustrating and I frequently wanted to shake them.
On a similar note, nearly all the characters are exactly as racist, sexist, and homophobic as you would expect a bunch of sailors in the mid-19th century to be. Although these views are eventually negated by the narrative, it can be irritating to spend hundreds of pages with racist statements just getting repeated over and over again. Not to mention that the main villain (who is ridiculously, mustache-twirling, over-the-top villainous) is one of the few gay characters.
But despite all of these complaints, I did quite like the book. I was vaguely aware of the Franklin expedition before starting, since I used to have a professor who was obsessed with it. The Terror is compelling and hard to put down, as things just keep getting worse and worse and worse for these people. It's not exactly scary – it's not the sort of book that will make you afraid to turn off the lights – but it is clearly part of the genre of "ill-prepared white people stumble into Native mythology that turns out to be more real and less myth". It's a fascinatingly detailed recreation of a specific time and place, and left me wanting to learn even more about the real life Franklin expedition. Recommended if 700 pages of nautical history mixed with giant monsters sounds like a good idea to you, especially if – like me – you are totally willing to believe that icy cold temperatures are inherently terrifying.
The Chili Cookbook: A History of the One-Pot Classic, with Cook-off Worthy Recipes from Three-Bean to Four-Alarm and Con Carne to Vegetarian by Robb Walsh. This book has far too much history and straightforward narrative to quite be a cookbook, but way too many recipes to be a non-fiction book. It's something in between. Which is kind of cool, actually, since I like both those genres. This book distinguishes itself from some of the other chili cookbooks out there by its focus on the history of chili and the many food traditions which have influenced it, which is an approach that I haven't seen before. It allows for some very different recipes, ranging from Aztec lobster and corn stew, to Hungarian goulash, to Greek makaronia me kima. Even when we've reached America, Walsh goes period by period, allowing you to see the different fads that have changed how we cook chili. (Although personally, I was more interested in these chapters for their historical value than because I plan on trying the recipes. I'm not cooking anything that has 'render tallow' as a step.)
I appreciated that Walsh doesn't take sides on many of the common chili debates. There are recipes here for chili with and without beans, an entire chapter of vegetarian chilis, as well as white and green and old-school red chilis. There are recipes as low-class as frito pie and coney dogs, and as fancy as chilis that incorporate short ribs, lamb, or mole sauce. I made the recipe called "Three-Bean Chipotle Chili" and confirm that it was as delicious as the pictures were lovely.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. Another NetGalley book, because I am way over the limit in the number of books I've requested, and need to get these reviews finished.
