I started pondering this question after reading in L.J. Seller’s blog, her question about whether people determine what they read based on gender of the author or protagonist. In an effort not to copy her absolutely brilliant question, I’ve developed my own: Does the weather influence the genre you read?
Weather perversely effects mood with gloomier weather usually spurring on lazier indoor activities and bright and mild weather pulls us to be outside absorbing vitamin D. Im my own case, I read all the time. If it’s raining, I stay in bed and read and if it’s sunny, I don my sunglasses and stake out a deck chair someplace and bring my book with me, but does the weather also play a role in determining what I read? I’d say so. In most cases, when the weather is foul, I’m much more likely to pull out the annals of Poe or Dostoyevsky than I am to select one of the 7 volumes of Harry Potter stories. However, there are the days I try to battle meteoric melancholy by skimming the pages of something like Shopaholic Takes Manhattan instead of The Bell Jar. Our summers are full of things that bookshops like to denote as “Beach reads,” which are light, fluffy stories that you can skim, absorb, and feel good about, but what do the stores set aside as winter reads?
What do you think about the weather and the type/genre of the material you peruse?
