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    The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate
    The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate
    The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate

    Written by Nancy Campbell

    Narrated by Tania Rodrigues

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    About this audiobook

    ‘A wonderful book: Nancy Campbell is a fine storyteller with a rare physical intelligence. The extraordinary brilliance of her eye confers the reader a total immersion in the rimy realms she explores. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow — I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth’ Dan Richards, author of Climbing Days
    A vivid and perceptive book combining memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place, which will appeal to readers of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Olivia Laing. 

    Long captivated by the solid yet impermanent nature of ice, by its stark, rugged beauty, acclaimed poet and writer Nancy Campbell sets out from the world’s northernmost museum – at Upernavik in Greenland – to explore it in all its facets. From the Bodleian Library archives to the traces left by the great polar expeditions, from remote Arctic settlements to the ice houses of Calcutta, she examines the impact of ice on our lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change.

    The Library of Ice is a fascinating and beautifully rendered evocation of the interplay of people and their environment on a fragile planet, and of a writer’s quest to define the value of her work in a disappearing landscape.

    ‘The Library of Ice instantly transported me elsewhere... This luminous book is both beautifully written and astute in its observations, turning the pages of time backwards and revealing, like the archive of the earth’s climate stored in layers of solidified water, the embedded meanings of the world’s icy realms. It is a book as urgently relevant as it is wondrous’ Julian Hoffman, author of The Heart of Small Things

    ‘An extraordinary work not only for the perspicacity and innate experience of the author who leads the reader carefully across intertwined icy tracks of crystallised geographics, melting myths and frozen exploration histories, but through her own tender diagnostics of what reading ice can show us in these times … Perilous in its scope, exacting in its observation, wild in intellect, The Library of Ice captures the reader’s attention almost as if caught in ice itself’ Kirsten Macgillivray, poet
     
    ‘This is travel writing to be treasured. A biography of ice, the element that has another life, with hard facts thawed and warmed by a poet's voice. Campbell's writing is companionable, curious, deeply researched and with no bragging about the intrepidity that has taken her between winter-dark Greenland, Polar libaries, Scottish curling rinks, Alpine glaciers and Henry Thoreau's pond at Walden’ Jasper Winn, author of Paddle
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio UK
    Release dateNov 1, 2018
    ISBN9781471169359
    Author

    Nancy Campbell

    Nancy Campbell is an award-winning writer, described as 'a deft, dangerous and dazzling new poet' by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her previous book on the polar environment, Disko Bay, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2016. A former magazine editor, she contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, Royal Academy Magazine and other journals. She has been a Marie Claire 'Wonder Woman', a Hawthornden Fellow and Visual and Performing Artist in Residence at Oxford University. She lives in Oxford.

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    Reviews for The Library of Ice

    4/5

    22 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved this book, feasting on stories ancient and contemporary - learning as we travelled through icy worlds... Excellent.
    • 5/5
      Very interesting insight to the uses of ice over the years.
    • 4/5
      Water is one of the only elements that can exist on our planet in its solid, liquid and gaseous state. At the poles and high points of our world is where the ice, for the time being at least, still exists. It seems like a permanent, immovable substance, which it mostly is, but as the global temperatures climb then this cold heaven becomes more transient. Snow and ice are substances that have captivated Nancy Campbell since childhood and she decided that she wanted to follow in the literary footstep of other great writers and write about ice.

      However this is not a travel book in the usual sense, she is as happy wading through the archives in the Bodleian library and looking at art as she is visiting Greenland and Iceland in the far north or reminiscing about the ice dance champions from the 1980s. She sees a shaman dressed in white and wearing antlers who is there to open the curling ceremony and learns in Scotland the correct way to make a rink for the sport.

      To understand the ice, you need to think in term of deep time. Ice at the bottom of the glaciers in Antarctica has been there for thousands of years, and Campbell ponders the science of looking back through our planets climate history through cylinders of ice.

      I really liked this book, there are contemplative and reflective moments as she seeks out these cold places of our planet, but also moments of warmth as she spends time with the Inuit in Greenland and understands how they have depended upon the ice for generations and the threats that they face. With her writing, there are points of lucid clarity like sparkling clear ice and other moments where the writing is diffused by the history of a moment.
    • 4/5
      I got a copy of this book through Netgalley. It's reflections on a travelling writing life, as Campbell travelled on various writing retreats in the frozen north, especially Iceland. She speaks to museum and gallery curators reflecting on art and literature inspired by ice and wild places, as well as exploring glaciers and human habitation on the edges of frozen coasts.My favourite parts of the book were here reflections on language: I really liked this on the different words for different types of ice. "The ice conditions in Qaanaaq are closest to my own experience on Upernavik. I begin with haard’dloq, extremely thin new ice that cannot be stepped on without danger, and then hikuliaq, new ice, which is still slippery and yet can be travelled across. When hikuliaq is older it becomes hikuliamineq – you might call it old-new ice – as it gets thicker there are frost flowers (kaneq) on its surface; the kaneq mean it is no longer slippery, no longer dangerous, safe to travel across. But not forever. When hikuaq and hikuapajaannguaq break up, they make eqinnikkalaat – splinters of thin ice that can lacerate skin..."