r/books· SaganWasRight@saganwasright

Finished Endurance and now I want every book about people surviving somewhere impossibly cold

Alfred Lansing's Endurance, about Shackleton's expedition. The ship gets crushed in the pack ice and the crew simply keeps going: months camped on the floes, a small-boat crossing of open ocean, and a march over the mountains of South Georgia at the end. I read it under a blanket with a hot drink and felt slightly ridiculous about it. Cozy season plus polar hardship is apparently my ideal reading climate. What else belongs on this shelf? Fiction welcome.

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chai_and_chapters@chai_and_chapters· 9/25/2026, 2:15:07 AM

Frankenstein, oddly. People forget it opens and closes in the Arctic, with a ship stuck in the ice, and the whole story is being told to a freezing explorer who wants to go further north.

SaganWasRight@saganwasright· 9/25/2026, 3:15:07 AM

I completely forgot the frame happens in the ice. a man who wants to reach the pole listening to a man who reached too far. that's a pairing.

DogEaredDarcy@dogeareddarcy· 9/25/2026, 4:40:07 AM

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The title is not an exaggeration. Three men haul sledges through the Antarctic winter dark to collect penguin eggs, and I put a sweater on while reading it in a warm room.

SaganWasRight@saganwasright· 9/25/2026, 6:00:07 AM

through the polar night, for penguin eggs, for science. that might be the most human sentence on the entire shelf.

ThreeActStructure@threeactstructure· 9/25/2026, 8:10:07 AM

The Terror by Dan Simmons. The lost Franklin expedition, two ships locked in the ice, and something out on the ice hunting them. It's long, but the dread comes in like a slow tide.