Astoria - Peter Stark

Our May bookclub book was Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, by Peter Stark. Nate recommended this one, and I really enjoyed it!

Astoria is a remarkable true tale of ambition, wilderness exploration, and hardship, recounting John Jacob Astor's efforts to establish the first American outpost in the Pacific Northwest, as a means of building a hugely profitable global trading empire. Astor was a friend of Thomas Jefferson's, and undertook the mission with his support.

While Astor remained comfortably lodged at home in his mansion in New York, he sent two parties, an overland and an oversea party, to try to forge a path through the wilderness, and meet up in present-day Astoria, Oregon (about a 2 hour drive northeast of Portland, on the Columbia River and coast of the Pacific Ocean). The story covers the 3 years of their expedition, from 1810-1813.

Astor was an incredibly far-seeing and enterprising person, and he did his utmost to select the very best men and equipment for his missions. Even still, the journeys were incredibly brutal, owing in part to the roughness of the unknown terrain, physical hardship and starvation, and constant stress from fear of Native American attack, and in part due to interpersonal conflicts and ignorance among the party members themselves.

A fascinating story! Definitely recommend, especially for Pacific Northwest enthusiasts.

Red Rising - Pierce Brown

My bookclub's April pick is Pierce Brown's Red Rising (see our full calendar here). When I first picked up this book, I was turned off by the clunky, dialect-heavy feel of the dystopian Mars mining colony - it reminded me a bit of the feral children's irritating ramblings in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome about "tomorrow-morrow land."

"I's looking behind us now, into history back."

However, the book's scope explodes beyond this point, and I became very engrossed in its exploration of the themes of social control, exploitation, and revolution.

Personally, I thought the movie Hunger Games was insipid, but I would recommend this book to HG fans, and any other survival enthusiasts.

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

Stephenson's fascinating new sci-fi novel, Seveneves, reads much like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy in its realistic and highly-detailed portrayal of space exploration technology. The novel opens when an unknown force - the Agent - causes our Moon to explode. After a period of global bafflement, American scientist and media personality Doc Dubois realizes that the moon's fragmentation will continue exponentially, ultimately causing a Hard Rain of meteorites to obliterate the earth's service in a terrible holocaust lasting thousands of years. Scientists all over earth come to the same conclusion within a matter of weeks, and the entire world's resources are dedicated to preparing to save as many humans as possible by getting them onto a space station, along with earth's genetic data. If this feels like a spoiler, it's not, this merely sets the stage for all the action that unfolds from there! About the latter third of the book is dedicated to even more radical extrapolation from these initial conditions... Very unique and thought-provoking.

Stephenson is a brilliant social critic, and his book is rich with insights and neologisms like "amistics" -

"choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish... who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices."

Highly recommend!

The Martian - Andy Weir

"Robinson Crusoe in space" is how our bookclub organizer described The Martian, and this is a pretty apt description. Our intrepid astronaut hero Mark Watney is left stranded on Mars when his crew takes him for dead following a terrible accident. Using his botany and mechanical engineering skills, Mark must survive and find a way to let Earth know that he's still alive!

This fast-paced action thriller is written in a highly loose and conversational style, with entries styled as Mark's log. Recommended for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson, though this is much less literary and more of a beach read. Still fun and thought-provoking!

Also, here's a (kind of) relevant clip from Total Recall:

S.A.S. Survival Handbook

Thank you very much, Mark, for this wonderful Christmas present! I had read about this some time ago as being the "definitive guide" to wilderness survival, a topic of great interest to me. This book is fantastic - based on a lifetime serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), an elite British army unit, Wiseman packs this invaluable book full of comprehensive, clear, practical information about building shelter, finding food and water, and staying safe and healthy in all emergency scenarios and situations. The diagrams are very clear, and his writing style is quaint. Very enjoyable to read, and who knows, one day it could save your life!!

On a related note, check out the CDC's fun and educational illustrated narrative on emergency preparedness, zombie style.