Antarctic Navigation - Elizabeth Arthur

Wow, this is a huge book, both dimensionally and pagecount-wise. I've been lugging it back and forth on the train for weeks, and finally finished it. Strangely, now that it's done, I wouldn't mind if it went on a little longer.

There is a poblem with listening to podcasts and reading at the same time while commuting. Neither gets done particularly effectively and books take ages to read, but at least the commute doesn't seem so long.

This book is far too long and far too complex to summarise the plot properly in a post like this. Long story very short: Girl finds her dream, goes to Antarctica, lives to tell the tale and gains some fundamental personal insights into humans and the planet.

It's a novel, make no mistake about that. However, it reads with more verisimilitude than some extreme explorers' true tales of trippy travels. More than likely, this is because Arthur is a writer by profession, whereas the explorer writers tend to be rather skilled adventurers who don't write as well as they, say, climb Mt Everest. The believability of the story suggests to me that there was a heck of a lot of research going on, and that has to be respected.

I particularly appreciated the 'path to awareness' that many of the characters took in growing aware of the stupid way humans behave with regard to using up resources and the short-term view that tends to prevail - and it probably is easier to appreciate stories that one identifies with. (Ha, and my job is researching how to get people to buy more crap. Ironic, or just sad?)

Some of the book is a little less than believable - but since some of it is set in the sixties and seventies, perhaps allowances need to be made - like a guy whose head is attuned to the Earth's magnetic field, and so experiences extreme disorientation and nausea in the odd place where there's iron ore in great concentration or something like that, or the fellow who can sense storms 3 days out, down to just about the hour...

In all, the characters are ones that it is reasonable to care about. They are all flawed, thus real; and they are all necessary for the story. There isn't a part of the book that begs questioning why it is there.

Wow. This is a book.