❄ POLARISMS *+
opening remarks
welcome to bon's most specialest page ^_^ i've been deep in the polar trenches since i watched amc's the terror and it kind of just spiraled out of control from there, although i have been interested in the poles since i was younger. i've graduated from my interest in the FE and moved into a more inclusive fascination with the history of both the poles and their respective ecologies (although i'm more interested in arctic ecology/hist/sociology/etc).
this has been one of the more defining interests of the last few years, although television remains the forerunner. i'm not an expert in anything on this page, this subject simply brings me an immense amount of joy.
I walk here intent on the birds, half aware of the biological mysteries in these placid, depthless waters in which I catch fleeting silver glimpses of cod. I feel blessed.
i do have friends and family who have worked or currently work in the arctic and antarctica, of whom i am immensely jealous. they bring me home wonderful treasures and give me lots of books to read and show me pictures though. beautifulworld! as a result i have a sizeable collection of polar books and ephemera.
it is important to me to acknowledge that although the history of human forays into the arctic is often labeled "polar exploration," i reject the premise that the british men found anything that the native peoples living in the high arctic did not already know.
if you enjoy this page i ask you to please turn your attention to the very real struggles of the Indigenous communities and animals in the arctic who are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. although the history of the arctic is interesting to learn about, the region is still very much a thing of the present and contending with contemporary issues we should all be informed about.
bookshelf
i own a large collection of polar/adj literature, this is a mixture of ones i own and i've read (or partially read), ones i've read but don't own, and ones i own and haven't read yet, which are awaiting reviews :-) not a comprehensive list by a long shot u_u i read a lot about arctic history, science, and sociology mostly, but i dabble in antarctic lit and age of sail stuff as well.
click on the covers for my thoughts on the book
I did not feel like an interloper. I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, is if it were water.
ever read a book so insanely good you need to reevaluate your entire life. a physical demonstration of my love for this book to begin: i tend to dogear the bottom corner of pages with lines i love in the books i own and i don't think i've ever finished a book with so many dogears. this is one of the most wonderful pieces of literature i've read on the arctic to date. lopez's prose is so lucid and immersive, and i loved the wit and personality that bled through, especially in the latter third when the focus shifts to historical figures. i think that the label "travel" on this book is misleading because yes he does travel to the places he's writing about but the travel isn't the point, the landscape is. to call this travel feels almost demeaning.
i went in knowing that this book was published in the eighties and i expected it to be at least partly a product of its time, and it was, but i think it is also remarkably compassionate and curious about the cultures it describes. it toes the line of the noble savage trope in some of the descriptions of the high arctic Inuit culture but you can tell he tries to balance it out, which i appreciated. so much love and research went into the explanations of the cultural history of the arctic. it's hard to even articulate how beautiful the writing is and how well it was balanced with the science.
there were a lot of lines and paragraphs that will stick with me for a long time, but i think in many ways the most important part is right at the very end, when he details the living conditions and opinions of the men at the work camps on the oil fields. i suspect that the attitudes of the men who were employed there 40 years ago aren't all that different from the ones employed there now.
There is a distrust, a cursing of women, that is unsettling. Woman and machinery and the land are all spoken of in the same way––seduction, domestication, domination, control.
this book took me a long time to finish but i'm grateful i took my time with it. the only part that started to drag for me was at the beginning of the chapter on polar explorers, mostly because i'd read a lot of the material in barrow's boys. the insight into FE was interesting considering there still wasn't much information out about it at this point (i think). i especially enjoyed the characterization of peary and his predecessors/contemporaries/rivals/etc. made me giggle.
what a privilege it is to live on a world where the arctic exists. how beautifulwonderful. i think mr. lopez would agree. thank you world!
I look back at the pipeline, this final polished extrusion of all the engineering. There are so few people here, I keep thinking. Deep in the holds of those impersonal buildings, the only biology is the dark Devonian fluid in the pipes.
when i say i spent about a year trying to track this book down i am 100% dead serious about this. most arduous book finding journey of my life. after trying to find it through both local and int. interlibrary loans and coming up with nothing, i put in a purchase request to the library. they sat on this request for about four months and by the time they told me it had been cancelled because they couldn't find anywhere to purchase it from, i had already taken matters into my own hands and bought it from the very small english press it's from.
muskox land
similarly arduous journey to find a copy of this book, but my local interlibrary loans system did end up having it which was awesome. i used it extensively for a research paper i did in 2025 and since the interlibrary loans are only 45 days i ended up spending a grueling couple of hours scanning the pages i needed for my project, organizing them, and then converting/compressing them into a pdf.
i wasn't able to finish the whole thing but i did find it to be an exceptionally well researched piece, it expounded on a lot of the post-franklin expeditions that i needed information on. i will probably go back to it soon and finish it u_u
other readings/outlinks
in addition to books, i also have a substantial collection of articles from journals/publications, as well as supplementary websites. this will be slow to update because i have to track everything down again.
more tba soon :-) keep an eye out. go home