Life in a Northern Town

This week it's a link to ... well, I don't know what you'd call it -- an article, a nonfiction novella? Anyway, it's online and it's free.

Out in the Great Alone by Brian Phillips: the author (city born and bred) becomes fascinated with the Iditarod so he decides to travel to Alaska and watch the entire race, all 1000 miles of it, from a small plane. This is his account of his adventures, an outsider's-eye view of Alaska that is, I have to admit, disturbingly accurate -- from the unique blue color of the long winter twilight, to the way that rural people are so unused to strangers that they don't quite know how to cope with having another human being in their space. It's not a deep memoir full of philosophical insights, but rather a lightweight, amusing and fun travelogue.

Here, for example, his bush pilot/guide is teaching him how to land on a frozen lake in the event of an emergency. (Nugget is the name of the airplane.)

( Excerpt under cut )

... which gives you a pretty good idea what the whole thing is like. It's also full of interesting details, historical and otherwise, about the race and the little towns along the way; I learned a few things I didn't know.

Well, I tried doing that "what are you reading on Wednesday?" meme, but I kinda petered out because it was simply too random; the last book I read was usually something I didn't have much to say about, and I ended up talking about a lot of books I didn't like, and that wasn't fun.

So instead, I'll use these Wednesday reading posts to recommend a book that I read and liked.

This week, it's Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road in Australia). It's YA, and it was originally recommended to me by naye. The library finally had it -- it's been checked out every time I've gone looking for it for the last few months -- so I read it and was completely blown away. Also I somehow forgot the part of naye's recommendation post (note: spoilers in the comments on the LJ side) where she mentioned that the book "wrenched my heart out and set it on fire and threw the ashes in the river." Er, yes, that about sums it up. It turned me into a sobbing MESS. Although I realized when I started trying to explain to Orion why his wife was crying her eyes out that ... it's actually sort of hard to describe WHY I was so wrecked at the end of the book. It was a good kind of wrecked! Really, I swear.

Anyway, the book is YA, so if a basic, to-the-point YA writing style and teen protagonists are not your thing, then you may not like it. Also, it really does put you through the emotional wringer. But I absolutely loved it and recommend it VERY highly. It's been a long time since I read a book that was so completely surprising, on almost every level; although I finally got a decent grasp on it by about halfway through, it's a book that really throws all your expectations in terms of genre and characters and plot. It's difficult to talk about the book in more detail without getting into spoilers, and this is a book that I am very glad I read unspoiled. However, there are some more spoilery comments under the cut (not really a "review" so much as random things I liked about the book).

( Spoilers here (mainly for the first half of the book - but I do STRONGLY recommend reading unspoiled if you prefer to read that way) )

Short version: this is highly recommended. :)