Rainy day readers miss the boat when it comes to experiencing the pleasure of reading on the hottest days of the year. Thanks to global climate change, this may soon change. Readers will learn to anticipate the moment they fall into a sunny daze and need to assemble a pile of the right sunny day books before the haboob strikes.
Little compares to snuggling up to a book on a 115-degree day, when the mercury rising in the thermometer reminds me how good it feels inside a refrigerator. Desert rats don’t bury our noses in a book when the rain comes. We dash outside to let the water wash away our crust (unless it’s monsoonal then we try to not be swept away in the wash). Such a wondrous weather experience like rain requires savoring via all the senses. Unbearably sunny days–that’s the time to take cover between the covers of a good book. The experience of a sunny day book is similar to reading on the beach, only without the ocean breeze, or the ocean.
Sunny day book criteria are simple. The text should match the weather–piercing, burning, angry. Murder mysteries, true crime or political thrillers complement the dry hate, uhm, heat. The book must be readable from a windowless room in the center of your home, possibly in a prone position on the bathroom floor tile. Books with glow in the dark covers help in these situations. Finally, the book cannot distract the brain from basic body functions like evaporative cooling (sweating).
When the weather forecast calls for sunny day reading, newbies to the sunny daze experience should consider one of these classic books:
* Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Nothing compares to reading a book about burning books as the book you in your hands spontaneously combusts.
* An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore. Reading this book on an unseasonably hot day is like reading 1984 in 1984. Who knows what’s coming in the future? You do and it’s not cool.
* Dune by Frank Herbert. Why risk brainpower going into overtime imagining the desert planet Arrakis? Just look out your window. Reserve your brain function to moderate your internal swamp cooler–sweat.
* Wool by Hugh Howey. This book is a fantasy getaway for those suffering the unrelenting heat. It is the utopian dream of a better life.
* Holes by Louis Sachar. We can all identify with digging holes in a dried up lake.
Book selection for sunny day reading can be tricky for former rainy day readers. The characteristics in books they once followed easily, like those that take place in Tudor England, seem foreign while the foreign, like those that take place within the greenhouse gases of Venus, are familiar. Science fiction and fantasy novels cross over into realistic fiction. Really though, isn’t any book that can take our minds off the miserable heat an excellent sunny day book?