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Loading... Weatherby Jenny Offill
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. So good. I might have written it if I ever allowed anyone but Victoria to see my true self. Funny and full, pregnant really, of existential angst of a librarian, New Yorker, mother, trying to understand or at least simply navigate the quickly spiraling world. This is by no means a happy book. Reflecting on personal reactions an experiences during our currently trying times, Offill’s brief observations let us know we aren’t alone in this crisis. I think I need to own this book, for reassurance and affirmation. Small text postings, insightful and beautifully written Not sure what to make of that. A very short book consisting of short widely spaced paragraphs. Well not really paragraphs, more like diary entries. That's what it reads like. Random diary entries. From a librarian becoming obsessed with survivalism and wondering how best to cope with her mentally ill brother. Starts nowhere, leads nowhere.
Offill is in total control here, and all the asides, jokes and Q&As reflect the fraying state of Lizzie’s mind as her concerns over the climate crisis, the Trump administration, pernicious algorithms and other man-made threats intensify. Lizzie’s predicament, and the real question at the heart of this novel, is how she is supposed to prepare for the end of the world when day-to-day life itself is so maddening....“Weather” is too sharp a book to allow for pessimism or apathy. There is simply too much to be done, and there are too many people to care for and about, the novel argues, to not work through our deepest fears and fight our way past this crisis. While marriage and motherhood remain on the radar, Weather swirls around amber waves of dread. Offill's signature achievement here is to capture the angst specific to our particular moment in time — the rising tide of anxiety, especially in New York City, about a world threatened by climate change and the ascension of right-wing strongmen, which deepens after the 2016 election. Offill astutely compares the "hum in the air" to the one that followed 9/11. This potent, appealing little book is about how we weather this sense of doom — with humor, incredulity, panic, disaster preparedness, or, best of all, action. “Weather” is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son’s backpack and putting away the dog’s “slobber frog,” a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son’s backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children....Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it. The answer, of course, is that it can do both; that it inevitably does both.... Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun....In “Weather,” the collapse exists on a scale at once broader and more abstract: the end of the world itself. The thing that cannot be stared at directly is not the sun, but our own doomed planet. AwardsNotable Lists
"Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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