Visitors to Britain are often bemused by the amount of time people here spend talking about the weather.
If you eavesdrop on any encounter between two people, in the street, a shop or a waiting room, you can bet that within the first couple of minutes at least one of them will comment on how hot/cold/wet/windy/humid it is that day. You’ll also hear the same phrases used frequently — “good for the garden” is a favourite one on a rainy day after a prolonged spell of dry weather while “heat waves” (which seldom last longer than a few days”) will typically get the “we need a good storm to clear this” reaction.
Why we have this fascination with the weather is a mystery to me — maybe it’s favoured because it’s an easy, non threatening topic and something that people, especially strangers, have in common. Or is it that we are uncomfortable making small talk?? If you think you know the answer, do let me know!
In the meantime let’s get down to the business of today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic. There is a link with my ramblings I promise.
Today’s prompt is “Books with Weather Events in the Title/on the Cover.” My list of ten includes books I’ve read and those which are yet to be read. Links take you to reviews where they exist.
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
I don’t think the plot has anything to do with the weather but I thought the title in a year which has seen multiple extreme weather-related events around the globe: from soaring temperatures and wild fires in Greece to flash floods in New York. It’s among my stack of unread books.
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
The weather does play a role in this novel. The British heatwave of 1976 provides a background for a tale of a family crisis triggered when a woman wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. When the couple’s three children converge on the family home, jealousies; hostilities and stand offs are all revealed.
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Very few clouds but plenty of sunshine to be seen in one of Winton’s best known novels. It’s a wonderful sprawling tale of two families who share Number 1 Cloudstreet, a large ramshackle house in a suburb of Perth. Over the course of 20 years we see these two families, whose attitudes to life couldn’t be more different, wrangle; laugh; love; struggle; separate and occasionally come together.
History of the Rain by Niall Williams
Ruth Swain lies in a boat-shaped bed in an attic, watching rain streaming on to the skylight. It rains a lot in Ireland she thinks, though it’s unlikely to be true that it hasn’t stopped raining since the sixteenth-century. Williams’ novel is an odd one. Ruth is an engaging character – how could she fail to be othrwise when she is surrounded by books shelves full to toppling and an intention to read her way through her late father’s collection of 3,958 books.
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The winner of the Booker Prize in 1975, this is a novel which focuses on the cultural divide in India in the 1920s. The plot centres on a British woman who causes. a scandal when she forms a relationship with a Nawab for whom she leaves her husband.
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry by Mildred Taylor
A book for younger readers I was introduced to when i took a course on children’s literature. Taylor’s story has achieved classic status for its treatment of racialism in the rural southern states during the American depression.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital – Sheri Fink
In 2005, one of the deadliest hurricanes ever experienced by the USA, hit southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi, causing more than 1800 deaths. Fink’s book is an account of how the Memorial Hospital in New Orleans became embroiled in a police investigation and legal battle because of decisions taken during that storm.
What the world didn’t know was that at New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital, right in the centre of the maelstrom, life and death decisions were taken that would become the focus of a legal battle.
Love in A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
Another weather-related title that doesn’t actually feature the weather in the narrative. The coldness here refers. to the indifferent attitude to the marriage market shown by one Polly Hampton, the only child of an immensely rich and very aristocratic Earl of Montdore. She remains aloof at the debutante balls meant to introduce her to desirable marriage partners; having already decided she will marry her uncle (a lecher and serial womaniser).
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
A short, rather bleak tale of a love affair between Shimamura, a wealthy intellectual from Tokyo and Komako, a young geisha he met in a remote hot spring town. As the book opens Shimamura travels to the town in. the depths of winter in the hope of rekindling the affair.
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks
I used to love this author’s work but the last one I read by him — A Week in December — was disappointing. I’m hoping Snow Country, a 2021 title, will restore my interest in his work. It’s a work of historical fiction spanning the period 1906 to 1933, featuring a snow-bound sanatorium near Vienna and the relationship between a writer and a maid.
Snow by John Banville
This is what I would describe as thoughtful crime fiction. Banville offers an atmosphere-laden locked-room mystery that parallels frosty familial relationships within a ramshackle Irish manor house with the icy roads and snowy landscape outside.
I’ve been surprised how many books I’ve read or own that have weather-related titles. I could easily have added more. So here’s a bonus list of five.
- Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Miss Smila’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg
- Snowblind by Ragnar Jonasson
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Zafon