One of my favorite books so far this year is "The Cloudspotter's Guide" by British author Gavin Pretor-Pinney. I have always been a cloudwatcher and know most of the cloud types and names from reading over the years, but I've never read anything that presents meteorology in such an entertaining manner. I might call the tone of some of this book "twee," a British descriptive which is sort of like the American "cutesy." In other places, the author sounds like a British comedian along the lines of "Beyond the Fringe." He throws in references to all sorts of non-weather subjects as analogues, from pop music to ancient mythology to Roman history. These are there to make a point as well as keep the book from being too dry (which would stop the moist clouds from forming anyway).

Despite the cuteness, this book contains plenty of real meteorological information, as well as illustrations of the various types of clouds and how they form. The author painstakingly describes atmospheric processes such as convection and condensation, air layers and temperature inversions, precipitation and evaporation. But he never gets too heavy. This is, after all, a book not for scientists but for lay people who like clouds and have an interest in weather. There are more of these people than you think, including high-placed types (so I have heard) whose favorite TV channel is "The Weather Channel." One of my very favorite websites is The Weather Channel Website where you can see up-to-the-minute radar readouts of American (and international) conditions. Summertime is especially exciting for weather fans because they can track thunderstorms as they blast through the area, brilliant blobs of red and yellow turbulence on the green background of radar rain.

Pretor-Pinney doesn't just give us a guide to clouds, but to other atmospheric phenomena such as sky colors, rainbows, halos, fog, jet contrails, snowflakes, freezing rain, lightning, and destructive clouds including tornadoes. There are also some extended passages where he describes his adventures in exotic places, looking for unusual cloud lore or rare cloud apparitions. He visits the London fish market looking for just the right kind of mackerel to illustrate the "mackerel sky." And in a later chapter, he goes to what would well be called the "end of the earth" in isolated rural Australia, looking for a fabulous rolling cloud called the "Morning Glory" which daring glider pilots use to "surf the sky."

The nice thing about clouds and cloud watching, as the author says, is that you don't need special equipment or enhanced physical abilities to do it. All you need is a window or a chance to get out and look at the sky. It's always changing, hardly ever boring, and aesthetically rewarding. And the names of clouds, for someone who loves Latin, are melodious and fun to say: Cumulus castellanus, Altocumulus translucidus, cirrus fibratus. I often look at clouds from an artistic point of view, trying to figure out how the cosmic scene painters depicted the white wisps or crisp billows on the perfect blue sky. Some artists such as the Dutch seventeenth century painter Jacob van Ruisdael were terrific at painting images of clouds. There is even music about clouds, which Pretor-Pinney somehow ignores: the famous "Nuages" ("Clouds") by French composer Claude Debussy. And for a more popular "New Age" approach, there is the delightful and soothing album by British composer Kevin Kendle, entitled simply "Clouds," which could easily serve as the soundtrack to the "Cloudspotter's Guide."

As a birdwatcher, I'm always looking up anyway, and now I have yet another flying, fleeting form of nature to observe and identify. Look, there are some Altostratus radiatus, grey-violet on the horizon. And here are Cirrostratus, painted in pure white on the blue heavens by a divine airbrush. No matter how grim the world may be, the clouds will always be uplifting.

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