Reading the North

Edited by Jeff Brown (Jeff Brown)

The blurb: An irreverent, travel-centric magazine highlighting quirks found across the 49th state.

Excerpt: "Nothing stirs a runner's adrenaline like a good chase. Add with that the loser of that chase possibly ending up as dinner, the odds are raised a few notches.

"But good odds or not, Juneau's annual Running of the Bears continues to attract contestants from all over the globe in this daunting match between man, woman, and beast."

Reflections of a Reluctant Alaskan

By Lee Jordan (Samson Press, $24.95)

The blurb: After asking the Army to send him anywhere but Alaska, Lee Jordan recounts his 1948 assignment with Alaska Communication System and the life he's lived in the state ever since.

Excerpt: "I stood on the icy dock at the tiny Alaskan port of Whittier, shivering in the bitter cold while gazing at the snow-covered mountains and silently cursing my carelessness of six years past. Going too fast on a bicycle caused an accident that resulted in four broken front teeth. Five years later, the need to repair those teeth in turn led to a three-year Army enlistment that took me to a place I didn't want to go, but a place where I chose to remain for sixty-plus years. At least my friend Bobby, who was also involved in that accident, lived to go on to national fame. But that was to come much later. What concerned me at that point was the twist of fate that brought me to this frozen frontier where it was still dark at mid-morning."

Caribou Island

By Davis Vann (HarperCollins, $25.99)

The blurb: On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on the Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unraveling. Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together by building the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place.

Excerpt: "My mother was not real. She was an early dream, a hope. She was a place. Snowy, like here, and cold. A wooden house on a hill above a river. An overcast day, the old white paint of the buildings made brighter somehow by the trapped light, and I was coming home from school. Ten years old, walking by myself, walking through dirty patches of snow in the yard, walking up to the narrow porch. I can't remember how my thoughts went then, can't remember who I was or what I felt like. All of that is gone, erased. I opened our front door and found my mother hanging from the rafters. I'm sorry, I said, and I stepped back and closed the door. I was outside on the porch again."

- Compiled by Matt Sullivan, Anchorage Daily News