Megan Berg is a creative consultant for web development, graphic design, and video production. She works with people around the world, including scientists, musicians, actors, filmmakers, teachers, theatres, and more. Her unexpected foray into polar work began at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as the Media Specialist for ANDRILL, the multinational Antarctic Geological Drilling program. She has filmed and documented two major International Polar Year programs- ANDRILL and POLENET (The Polar Earth Observing Network), using integrated media to make the science accessible to the public. She has worked as a designer and developer for the Natural History New Zealand film unit. She is currently the Education Generalist for UNAVCO.
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
-Edward P. Morgan
Some of my favorites:
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
The novel of family life in a Chinese village before the 1949 Revolution was a best-seller in both 1931 and 1932 and has been a steady favorite ever since.
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck.
The FountainheadAyn Rand
An individualistic young architect chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision.
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
A missionary family moves from Georgia, USA to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, close to the Kwilu River in 1959.
Digging to America
Anne Tyler
An Iranian-American family and an all-American suburban family meet at the airport on the day their infant daughters arrive from Korea to begin life in America.
Little Men
Louisa May Alcott
The story begins with the arrival of Nathaniel "Nat" Blake, a shy young orphan with a talent for playing the violin and a penchant for telling fibs.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women and how their lives cross each other, spanning from the 1960s to 2003.
The Red Tent
Anita Diamant
The story of the tent in which women of Jacob's tribe must, according to the ancient law, take refuge while menstruating or giving birth.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy, describes himself as ‘a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties’ living in Swindon, Wiltshire.
Petunia
Roger Duvoisin
The proud goose who didn't know how to read but convinced everyone she did.
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of 14 year-old Lily Owens, who is in search of her mother's past.
The Island
Victoria Hislop
Set on the island of Spinalonga, a leper colony off the coast of Crete, The Island tells the story of Alexis Fielding, a woman on the cusp of a life-changing decision.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
A group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island try to govern themselves, with disastrous results.
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Alexander McCall Smith
A Motswana woman, Mma Precious Ramotswe opens a detective agency in Gaborone, capital of Botswana. It's as much about the adventures and foibles of different characters as solving mysteries.
Black Sun
Edward Abbey
A rugged park ranger falls in love with an American girl half his age and then becomes wrongly blamed when she mysteriously disappears in the National Park where he works.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Follows the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery.
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison Shepherd works as a cook for the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, then as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile to Mexico.
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Set in Mumbai, India between 1975 and 1984 during the turmoil of The Emergency, a period of expanded government power and crackdowns on civil liberties.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The story starts during 1642, near Boston, Massachusetts, in a Puritan village. Hester Prynne is led from prison with her infant daughter in her arms, and on her gown "a rag of scarlet cloth" that "assumed the shape of a letter."
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
A collection of twisted, humorous parodies of famous children's stories and fairy tales, such as "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Gingerbread Man."
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
On the small copper mining island of Bougainville, all of the teachers, along with most of the other residents flee during the 1990s civil war while one white man, Mr. Watts, stays on the island and becomes the teacher.
The Chocolate War
Robert Cormier
Set at the fictional Trinity High School, Jerry Renault challenges the school's cruel, brutal, and ugly mob rule.
The Half Brother
Lars Saabye Christensen
The story opens in Oslo on May 8, 1945, when 20-year-old Vera, hoping to celebrate the end of World War II, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that crime is born a boy named Fred, a misfit.
Bliss
O.Z. Livaneli
Left in the barn to hang herself as a consequence of her uncle raping her, 15-year-old Meryem refuses. Her cousin is sent to take her to Istanbul and is told to kill her on the way.
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Takes place in Germany before and during World War II. The story is told from the point of view of Death, who finds Liesel Meminger to be very interesting, as she brushed Death three times in her life.
The Death of Vishnu
Manil Suri
The spiritual journey of a man named Vishnu dying on the landing of a Bombay apartment building.
Little Bee
Chris Cleave
A dual narrative story about a Nigerian asylum-seeker and a British magazine editor who meet during the oil conflict in the Niger Delta and are re-united in England several years later.
The Long Song
Andrea Levy
Told by July, a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 19th century, this is the story of her life during and after the slave rebellion.
The Queen of Palmyra
Minrose Gwin
Florence Forrest, lives in Millwood, Mississippi, the small segregated town where her father, Win, a burial insurance salesman, is the proud leader of the local Klansmen.
The Weight of Heaven
Thrity Umrigar
In the years following the sudden death of their seven-year-old son, Frank and Ellie Benton have witnessed the steady deterioration of their marriage. Their sudden move to India explores issues of love, altruism, and loss.
An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks
A book that concludes that "defects, disorders, [and] diseases... can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence."
I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops
Hanan al-Shaykh
Setting her tales in the Middle East, North Africa and London, al-Shaykh uses intellectual lightness to buoy even the most oppressive of situations: insanity, suicide, abandonment and immolation.
Saint Maybe
Anne Tyler
Stricken with guilt over the death of his older brother, Ian Bedloe raises three children unrelated to him by blood. He is strengthened in this Herculean task by the storefront Church of the Second Chance, to which he devotes himself with equal fervor.
Sold
Patricia McCormick
The story of a girl from Nepal named Lakshmi who is sold into sexual slavery in India.
Night
Elie Wiesel
A work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father, Shlomo, in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War.
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
A dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921 in response to personal experiences during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, and work in the Tyne shipyards during World War I.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Set in the near future, in a totalitarian theocracy which has overthrown the United States government, The Handmaid's Tale explores themes of women in subjugation and the various means by which they gain influence.
Wench
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Chronicles the lives of four slave women during the 1850s-—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters' mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio.
East of the Sun
Julia Gregson
Set in Bombay in the autumn of 1928, tells the story of the "Fishing Fleet" -- the name given to the legions of Englishwomen who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them.
Born Under a Million Shadows
Andrea Busfield
The Taliban have disappeared from Kabul's streets, but the long shadows of their brutal regime remain. In his short life eleven-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most.
Girl in Translation
Jean Kwok
A resolute yet naïve Chinese girl confronts poverty and culture shock with equal zeal when she and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn.
House of Stairs
William Sleator
5 sixteen-year-olds from city orphanages are placed in a prison and a hospital with no walls, no ceiling, and no floor: nothing but endless flights of stairs leading nowhere, with no perceivable edge.
The Power of One
Bryce Courtenay
When his mother suffers from a nervous breakdown, five-year-old Peekay is sent to a tiny rural Afrikaans boarding school. He is severely bullied and teased for being English.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Laurie R. King
In the early years of WW I, 15-year-old American Mary Russell encounters Sherlock Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs where Conan Doyle left him raising bees.
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg's father mysteriously disappears after experimenting with the fifth dimension of time travel. Determined to rescue him, Meg and her friends must outwit the forces of evil on a heart-stopping journey through space and time.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris
David Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's.
Sweet Dates in Basra
Jessica Jiji
When British warplanes begin bombing Iraq and the country's long-simmering tensions explode, the power of an unbreakable boyhood bond and a transcendent love must overcome the deepening fractures of a collapsing society.
