Adult Summer Reading 2011 – Antarctica

Before we cool down with a look at books focusing on Antarctica, get ready to brave the cold by filling out your Summer Reading Reviews (and get entered to win a prize)! Don’t forget that there are three ways to enter:

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Now that you’re warmed up and ready to go, chill out with one of these reads – and you might forget it’s 100 degrees in the shade:

1. This continent is a great candidate for an Armchair Travel Booklist, not necessarily because of the great amount of books on the subject, but because who in their right mind wants to actually go there (am I right)?

2. Unfortunately, I’ve not really read anything that fits into this location, but here are a few novels that use Antarctica as a thrilling setting (Annotations courtesy of NoveList Plus.):

In Cold Pursuit by Sarah Andrews

• Heading for Antarctica to study glaciology with her mentor, Dr. Emmett Vanderzee, Valena Walker finds herself thrust into the role of amateur sleuth when Vanderzee is arrested for the killing of a reporter, who died in Antarctica the previous winter.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

• In an afterlife world inhabited by the recently departed who remain in the memories of the living, Marion and Phillip Byrd fall in love again, while on Earth, their daughter, Laura, is stranded alone in an Antarctic research station.

Dark Winter by William Dietrich

• Twenty-six rugged adventurers become trapped for the winter at an Antarctic outpost, as a team of scientists must battle extreme conditions and subdue internal conflict to catch a killer among them.

Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson

• A comic reimagining of America’s racial history by a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award-winning writer follows a book collector’s enslavement by giant Antarctic ice creatures after he learns that Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished novel is actually a true story.

Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

• After months of seclusion following a tragic accident, journalist Michael Wolfe accepts an assignment in Antarctica, where the scientists and explorers from a South Pole research station stumble upon two bodies at the bottom of the ocean.

Ice Station by Matthew Reilly

• The discovery of a metallic object buried in a 100-million-year-old layer of ice–a discovery of immeasurable value–brings Lieutenant Shane Schofield and a team of Marines to Antarctica, where they will risk their lives to secure this discovery for the United States.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

• When the treaty protecting Antarctica from profiteers is about to dissolve–sending politicians and corporations scrambling to plunder its resources–a radical environmental group embarks on a campaign of sabotage to protect the land’s pristine beauty.

Subterranean by James Rollins

• A hand-picked team of scientists and specialists ventures deep beneath the Antarctic ice into a subterranean labyrinth that takes them into a perilous darkness toward an encounter with a terrifying mystery that is older than time itself.

Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez

• In a novel about isolation and loneliness, a young man heads for the Antarctic circle soon after World War I in search of solitude as a weather official, but his frozen solitude will be broken by a mysterious castaway.

3. Want to know more about the natural history of Antarctica? Check out one of these:

• A Natural History of the Antarctic: Life in the Freezer by Alastair Fothergill
• The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals by Peter Heller
• March of the Penguins by Luc Jacquet
• Antarctica: Secrets of the Southern Continent by David McGonigal
• Waiting to Fly: My Escapades with the Penguins of Antarctica by Ron Naveen
• Wild Ice: Antarctic Journeys by Ron Naveen