Welcome back to our podcast Reading with Libraries! We are so happy to be here chatting about books with you.
This week we are discussing books about weather.
We discuss different genres of books each week, which is both fun and useful to library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many book genres out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!
We want this to be fun – like a book group! And an important part of any book group is the beverages. As we start each episode, we will be enjoying our beverages; and as you – the listener – are also members of this book group, you should also have a beverage!
Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together!
Who is joining us this week? We are excited to welcome returning Guest Host Kelly Groth! Let’s get on with the show!
Beverages
Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages, and we each came prepared with our own drink to enjoy while we talk about our books. Each beverage will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!
Ingredients:
-
- 2 cups passion fruit juice
- 1 cup unsweetened pineapple juice
- 1 cup orange juice
- 3/4 cup lemon juice
- 2 cups carbonated water
- Ice cubes
- Pineapple wedges and maraschino cherries
Combine the juices in a pitcher. Just before serving, stir in carbonated water. Pour into hurricane or highball glasses filled with ice. Garnish with pineapple wedges and cherries.
Ingredients:
- 2 ounces white rum
- 2 ounces dark rum
- 3 ounces passion fruit juice
- 1 ounce orange juice
- 1/2 lime (juice)
- 1/2 tablespoon simple syrup
- 1/2 tablespoon grenandine
- orange slice (for garnish)
- cherry (for garnish)
Directions: Into a cocktail shaker, add the white rum, dark rum, passion fruit puree, orange juice, lime juice, simple syrup, grenadine and ice shake well. Strain into a hurricane glass filled with ice and garnish with a cherry and an orange slice.
Dark and Stormy
Ingredients:
- Ice
- 1½ ounces dark rum, preferably Gosling’s Black Seal rum
- Splash of bitters (optional)
- About ½ cup ginger beer
- Juice of ½ lime, plus a wedge for garnish
Fill a highball glass with ice. Add rum, a splash of bitters, if desired, and top with ginger beer. Squeeze the lime into the glass, stir, and add lime wedge as garnish.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 ounce blue Curacao
- 1/2 ounce peach schnapps
- 1/2 ounce vodka, such as Smirnoff
- Ice, for serving
- Pineapple juice
- Splash lemon-lime soda
- 1 cherry, for garnish
Combine the rum, Curacao, schnapps and vodka in a pint glass filled with ice. Top with the pineapple juice and stir. Top with the lemon-lime soda and garnish with the cherry.
Genre Discussion:
Today we are talking about books in which weather plays a main role. These books can be fiction or nonfiction, and can deal with things like natural disasters, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, or simply weather patterns and the climate of a particular area. Whether in fiction or reality, dealing with weather is always a part of life. As Minnesotans in the middle of winter, we know this all too well!
So let’s take a look at a few specific categories of weather books:
- Disaster books are a literary genre involving detailed descriptions of major historical disasters, often based on the historical records or personal testimonies of survivors. Since reportage of both natural disasters and man-made disasters is commonplace, authors tend to be journalists who develop their news reports into books.
- Meterology as defined by Merriam Webster means “a science that deals with the atmosphere and its phenomena and especially with weather and weather forecasting.
It can also refer to the atmospheric phenomena and weather of a region. - Climate Fiction as described by Margaret Atwood:
“There’s a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that’s being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot. Dystopic novels used to concentrate only on hideous political regimes, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now, however, they’re more likely to take place in a challenging landscape that no longer resembles the hospitable planet we’ve taken for granted.”
Suggested Reading Lists:
- For Kids
- Recommended Reading for the Young Meteorology Program
- Fiction Books About Storms
- Natural Disaster Fiction
- Listopia Weather Books (including lists like Death in a Warm Climate, Dead of Winter, Struck by Lightning, Hurricanes
- Goodreads Popular Nonfiction Weather Books
- Books for Weather Enthusiasts
Our Book Discussion
Now we are a little more familiar with this week’s genre, and we have enjoyed some of our special beverages, let’s get to the book discussion!
“On September 1, 1894 two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire in the first and only book on to chronicle the dramatic story that unfolded. Whereas Oregon’s famous “Biscuit” fire in 2002 burned 350,000 acres in one week, the Hinckley fire did the same damage in five hours. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. In some instances, “fire whirls,” or tornadoes of fire, danced out from the main body of the fire to knock down buildings and carry flaming debris into the sky. Temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit–the melting point of steel.
As the fire surrounded the town, two railroads became the only means of escape. Two trains ran the gauntlet of fire. One train caught on fire from one end to the other. The heroic young African-American porter ran up and down the length of the train, reassuring the passengers even as the flames tore at their clothes. On the other train, the engineer refused to back his locomotive out of town until the last possible minute of escape. In all, more than 400 people died, leading to a revolution in forestry management practices and federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires today.
Author Daniel Brown has woven together numerous survivors’ stories, historical sources, and interviews with forest fire experts in a gripping narrative that tells the fascinating story of one of North America’s most devastating fires and how it changed the nation.”
“Thousands of impoverished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered “land, freedom, and hope.” The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled, and America’s heartland would never be the same.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.”
“Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages.
This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions—Do I need an umbrella today?—to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change.
Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning: the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book’s typeface.
The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science.”
“”Rain is likely tonight, ending tomorrow. Thursday will be fair and cooler.” So began the final and most destructive act of Hurricane Camille, a storm so ferocious that scientists calculated the odds as once in a thousand years. In 1969, meteorologists were yet to have satellite and computer technology at their disposal, and the National Hurricane Centers director, Dr. Robert Simpson, could only rely on his instincts to predict Camilles track.
The Category Five storm, with wind gusts over 200 miles per hour, tore into the Mississippi/Alabama coast, erasing entire towns. At a hurricane party on a rooftop a few miles from where Camille made landfall, the nearly three-story tidal storm surgethe highest ever measuredcollapsed the entire building and swept 23 people to their deaths. Incredibly, the worst was yet to come.
As Camille hit the mountains of western Virginia she also collided with two other weather systems that squeezed millions of tons of water out of the storm like a sponge. It didnt just rain; the air held nearly the maximum amount of water theoretically possible, becoming a solid body of descending liquid, and lightning flashed sideways. Eight hours and more than two feet of rain later, 124 people in rural Nelson County were dead. Many of them, taken by the devastating floods, would never be found.
Roar of the Heavens tells Camilles destructive hour-by-hour story through the riveting first-person accounts of survivors and key players, including Dr. Simpson, who would later help to pioneer the universal Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes; Mary Ann Gerlach, the lone survivor of that hurricane party, who was later found clinging to a tree five miles away; and William Whitehead, the very untraditional sheriff of Nelson County, who became a central figure in the storms aftermath. At the height of school desegregation, blacks and whites came together to rebuild, and students worked together with locals who had so recently attacked them for demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
Camilles ferocity exposed the inadequacies of the nations ability to deal with such a cataclysmic event and led directly to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet Roar of the Heavens is also a cautionary tale, as the United States is still terribly unprepared to deal with hurricanes. When Katrina came ashore as a Category Four hurricane in 2005, over 1,000 lives were tragically lost, and experts agree that it is only a question of time before another Category Five storm hits the U.S. mainland.”
“Armani Curtis can think about only one thing: her tenth birthday. She’s having a party, her mama is making a big cake, and she has a good feeling about a certain wrapped box. Turning ten years old is a big deal to Armani. It means she’s older, wiser, more responsible. But when Hurricane Katrina hits the Lower Nines of New Orleans and tears her world apart, Armani realizes that being ten means being brave, watching loved ones die, and mustering all her strength to help her family weather the storm. A gripping story of courage and survival, Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere celebrates the power of hope and love in the face of the unthinkable.”
“Is Minnesota a great state? You betcha! Explore Minnesotas most fascinating facts and stories in the pages of The Minnesota Series. Breath taking winters. Wild summer storms. Famous hometown faces and music that got the whole world on its feet.”
“In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy in the land.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men — college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps — to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR’s national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.
THE BIG BURN tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time.”
“September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history–and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy.
Using Cline’s own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man’s heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac’s Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.”
“It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high―a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it “the perfect storm.” In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we’ve been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control.”
“Be careful what you wish for. A woman who was touched by tragedy as a child now lives a quiet life, keeping other people at a cool distance. She even believes she wants it that way. Then one day she utters an idle wish and, while standing in her house, is struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event sparks a strange and powerful new beginning.
She goes in search of Lazarus Jones, a fellow survivor who was struck dead, then simply got up and walked away. Perhaps this stranger who has seen death face to face can teach her to live without fear. When she finds him, he is her perfect opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both hide their most dangerous secrets–what happened in the past that turned one to ice and the other to fire.
A magical story of passion, loss, and renewal, The Ice Queen is Alice Hoffman at her electrifying best.”
“Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston’s North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-“Oh my God!” he shouted to the other men, “Run!”
A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston’s waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn’t known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.”
Conclusion:
Thank you so much for listening this week to our discussion of books about weather! We hope you enjoyed it. A special thank you to our Guest Host Kelly Groth for joining us!
Tune in next Thursday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is both interesting and fun! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.
Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!