I confess that I picked up Aaron Burch’s How to Predict the Weather out of my to-be-read pile (one of many, in truth) because it was short. I know Aaron, and so I’d intended to read it eventually anyway, but brevity is what drew me to it last night. And I liked it a lot. The book is extremely hard to categorize. It reads a bit like a collection of poetry (at about 100 pages in a small format, it’s about the right length). But it’s all prose, and the individual pieces are of two types. There are the instructions, in italics. And then there is the narrative of the unnamed man and woman and the trials and tribulations of their relationship. Since these latter pieces have, more or less, an overall narrative arc, leavened by the italicized instructions, the effect is of one cohesive short work—a novella in flash, maybe. Cool cover, too. There’s a lot to like about this little book.
