Another Revival...of this blog

I figured it would so much easier to do a 100 books in a year challenge, if I make it a calender year. So this will be my first entry for 2012:

I love it when one book leads me to another book and another book and another book. Right now I'm reading Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger. I was drawn to this book while reading The Third Man Factor. I may never have read either one if it hadn't been for Dan Simmons' Terror,  fictionalized account about the tragic Franklin Expedition of the mid nineteenth century--an expedition searching for the elusive Northwest Passage over the Arctic to the Orient.

I have to admit that Terror was a difficult book to listen to...it' not fun hearing how the men on two ships meet their end. I hadn't heard of the Franklin Expedition....ashamed, I am that I missed that in history. However, I think history studies (at least on this side of the pond) are remiss in the stories of later-day explorers, like Franklin and the others who followed, looking for a sign of him and his two crews.

The Third Man Factor is about the phenomena of believing that, when faced with severe stress and possible death, one believes that someone, some unknown stranger, is with them, leading them to safety. There are anecdotes about that in this book, many taking place in the coldest regions on earth. Is the third man an angel, a guide or a figment of an overactive, afraid brain? Good question. But many have survived great hardships and credit someone who "wasn't there."

The archaeological hunt for a reason for the death of Franklin's entire crew is covered in Frozen in Time. Three crew members were successfully buried on Beechey Island in the Arctic and a team exhumes (with all the proper documentation of an exhumation) the bodies to do autopsies. The fact that the bodies are in pristine condition (the book has color pictures of the bodies) because of being buried in the land's permafrost helped to make the final determination. The reason for the deaths? A very different one than most historians have believed for more than 150 years.

So why these books? Books about death in a frozen wasteland.
Man's ongoing searches on this planet fascinate me, especially the ones on the forbidden areas of snow and ice.

I'm now writing a short story about the two survivors of a fictitious Arctic expedition. I love when I'm inspired by what I read.