The most recommended books about Greenland

I really enjoy books where the central character is someone who is unused to solving crimes. In this case, the heroine, Thora, is a lawyer hired to investigate a project on the northeast coast of Greenland.

I loved the remoteness of the setting and how its very isolation puts the investigating team in a difficult position. I found the strange folklore and beliefs of the local inhabitants fascinating, especially the tales of creatures known as Tupilaqs, which add an uncanny layer to the story.

I found this real-life story of a man from Togo, who becomes obsessed with Greenland as a child and spends years working his way up through Africa and Europe to get there, fascinating.

Not only does it dig deeply into the everyday lives of native Greenlanders – dog-sledding, seal shooting, ice fishing, and a surprisingly open attitude towards sex – but we get a double dose of insight because we get to explore the Inuit way of life from an African’s perspective.

It’s a well-written and amusing account of an amazing and rare adventure; I enjoyed it immensely and would recommend to anyone who enjoys travel.

How can you not love a book that argues that, despite being mostly microbial, “the plankton form the bulk of the living fabric of the ocean, the web of life that is an integral part of the blue machine.”

Czerski’s prose is as vivid as describing other, larger parts of the blue machine, such as Greenland sharks, which live for hundreds of years, and whales whose earwax records the stress caused by global warming. Equally entertaining and captivating are her accounts of canoeing off Maui, fieldwork in the Arctic, and everyday life on an oceanographic ship.

Although the writing is always light and the metaphors evocative, Czerski makes several serious points about the ocean and climate change. If not for the ocean, atmospheric levels of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would be even higher and global warming worse.

Rule #1: Writers should write what they know. Many science fiction readers know Isaac Asimov as a prolific genre author. First and foremost, however, he is a scientist, a biochemist by training. In this book, Isaac and Janet Asimov share essays on diverse scientific subjects from life on earth to discoveries in space. For me, I searched the book for everything from the fate of the dinosaurs to the height of sea-level rise in case of a major melt-down of Antarctica and Greenland. 

In this book, imagination runs a parallel reality. It is a place where a writer or a reader will see a jumping-off place from the real world to dystopia. 

Why would I carry a one-kilo hardback around Greenland and Newfoundland on my back? Because Helge Ingstad was the archaeologist who discovered and excavated L’Anse Aux Meadowes, the first archaeological corroboration of Norse settlement in North America. Also because Land Under the Pole Star does the sort of sea exploration I have only dreamed about, following the Viking voyagers to Greenland and Vinland (wherever that was; personally I find Ingstad’s theories convincing). Not too colonial or patriarchal for modern sensibilities, Ingstad’s project is to relate the old Norse texts to what he finds on the ground. He’s an acute, sympathetic observer of Greenlandic life. I couldn’t have found a better guide, and if you like northern journeys with a scholarly purpose, this is the very book.

This book has been criticized for not including enough different locations of fluorescent minerals (which, here, are centred mainly around North America and Greenland), but personally, I think it is enough to make a start - it all depends where we are on, in our journey! 

Myself, I’m most stunned by the amazing photographs, which occupy a large portion of the book - showing various minerals under UV light (which, incidentally, is not the “UV light” that we know from parties) in a completely different context. This world is all around us, and yet most of us make no attempt to even know it. Has anyone done tours of underground caves under these lighting conditions, yet? And, if not, why not?

Maps lie. In the standard visualization you have on Google Maps, for instance, Greenland is shown as bigger than the whole South American continent, while it is, in fact, smaller than Argentina.

Monmonier did an incredible job unpacking the many surprising ways in which maps lie. My favorite case is the sneaky introduction, by publishing houses, of fake towns in US road maps to track plagiarists (as plagiarists just copy, they do not care about checking). There are so many fun examples in this profound book. 

This is an unusual crime story set in Copenhagen, Denmark. It caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. The main character Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit scientist from Greenland, lonely and homesick in the big city. The death of an Inuit boy pulls her into a complex web of crime exposing Denmark’s complicated relationship with its protectorate Greenland. The title refers to the Inuit people’s understanding of their wintry habitat, and is a reminder of the threat to traditional lifestyles of many indigenous people. A thriller, but so much more. 

Alistair MacLean’s thrillers have been a guilty reading pleasure of mine since high school, when MacLean churned out bestsellers like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare every year. MacLean creates tough, grim heroes who do whatever they have to do to get the job done. The writing is clumsy but effective, with heavy-handed humor and world-weary cynicism. The women are barely defined. And yet...

The plot, mood, and setting of each book provide one heck of an adventure. Like the crash-landing of a passenger airliner on the Greenland ice cap in Night Without End. A nearby team of scientists rushes to save the survivors. Among whom are the murderous criminals who caused the plane crash. A thoroughly riveting tale of survival in an Arctic wilderness.

My copy of Génsbøl’s nature guide is well-thumbed. I often used it to find out what I was eating. That’s right; it is a nature guide, packed with fabulous illustrations–better than photographs–that allow for easy identification of the flora and fauna of Greenland, but I also used it to identify what I was eating when invited to an Inuit hunter’s kaffemik–a celebration of culture, tradition, and food wrapped up in a birthday or child’s confirmation party. The guide is an indispensable companion for anyone travelling to the Arctic, and Greenland in particular. But it is equally enjoyable, perhaps even more so, when sitting in a favourite armchair with a favourite beverage in familiar surroundings, dreaming of the far north.