The Weather Man by Sam Hayes
I started 2017 with the goal to donate $1 to a crowdfunding project every day. It turned out to be very difficult. I tried multiple platforms and even looked through topics I’m not interested in. There was still a dearth of good-looking projects. Maybe this is why it’s better to dump millions into one idea. This book was one of the last donations I made – although it was effectively just buying the Kindle version.
1) “People wake up to you every fucking morning. If you aren’t making their day, you’re not worth their time.” – Harvey
Back when I watched CBS News before going to school, the weather segment was always the highlight. The weather reporters really do have an outsize impact on people’s days.
2) “You can always try to be anything you want to be, because at worst, failing means you are given a decent home printed in a day by the government and fed decently healthy food until you are old and not that gray. The safety net is so large there’s little you can do to miss it. We are left to figure out exactly what we most want out of our lives and live them.”
This story takes place 60 years in the future. The context is that America has emerged from WWIII, and – at least in America – most societal problems have been solved. I’m quite sure this will not be the case in 2076.
3) “But happiness is a heavy word. It’s held in such high esteem, and when you find a little of it you soon wonder, ‘Wait, so…is that it? This is it, right? Is this the thing we’re all going for? Do I have it? Did I have it? Do I need more of it? Is it already gone?'”
If you consciously debate whether you’re happy or not, you’re not.
4) “She used to go to Cubs games at the baseball museum and sometimes they had ‘rain delays,’ where you would just wait at the field for hours until it stopped.”
Rain delays are ridiculous. Controlling the weather will get political, but it doesn’t sound like an unsolved technical challenge.
5) “‘Happiness is a choice. We all know that. I choose it every day.'” – President Powers
Classic victim blaming.
6) “‘A thousand miles away from anybody – nobody to see it – those things are still crashing together in the dark, all cold and restless. It’s like they’re not doing this for show, you know? They really don’t give a shit if anyone’s watching.'” – Adam
Watching the ocean at night really puts humanity in perspective.
7) “‘FOMO is part of the problem'” – Adam
I should have stopped reading at this point, but I was too far into the book.
8) “‘I like change. Well, I hate change, but I really hate not to change.'” – Stella
I couldn’t agree more.
9) “One day they tried to get bored but only ended up laughing at how hard it was; it was the hardest thing they’d tried to do yet.”
Something that I don’t appreciate enough – on a macro level, I haven’t been bored for many years.
10) “While plenty of countries around the world have extremely loose borders, none of those countries are safe for Americans, leaving most of us nowhere to go.”
This sentence is logically fine but something is off…
While I’m impressed by people who can write books – especially fiction books, reading this one made me appreciate great writers. This book has a good premise and story, but the execution is quite poor. The characters are bland. The chapters are disjointed. And there were a lot of typos. I’m going back to the classics.