Jenny Offill

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020 'This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy' Ocean Vuong 'What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills? People think I'm funny' Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has 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 she 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 acknowledge the limits of what she can do. But if she can't save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Weather

From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis 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.

Sweet, sad. Hopeful, depressing. Nice, grounded read after more cerebral anxiety writing like Kunzru. 

Sarah E

a great cloud moving slowly while disintegrated to smaller clouds in blank november equator sky

solitones

armoni mayes

the author should have kept this in a stack of novels to never be released. probably one of the most boring, forgettable novels i’ve ever read that never needed a tree to be torn down and wasted for a book like this

also, the writing was lazy and also about nothing

Delightful read. Gobbled this up and loved sitting in the mind of Jenny Offil. The book is made up of fragmented thoughts all sewn together with a thin string. The web of heartfelt thoughts on climate, a doomed future, family… is oh so beautifully crafted. 

Bri Cortez

Cody Degen

Took some time for me to grow to enjoy the characters but once I did I found myself more invested than I originally expected. Read (listened) in one sitting, which I think made the experience more rewarding.

mic shulman

read for a virtual book club in the time of corona! i really connected to her constant baseline worry and sardonic voice, her disdain for hippies and concurrent meditation practice. i really haven’t liked a piece of art before that attempted to capture the time and the feeling around the 2016 election, but i think the distance we have from it now gives us the ability to talk about what it felt like without being so earnest and goofy. 
“I’m like a woman carrying a full cup of water into a room of strangers, trying not to spill it.”
“Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changes to sloth. (Two strikes then.)”
“You people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.”
“Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.”

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a "darkly funny and urgent" (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink--she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction--but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Amy Place

I guess I could go 2.5. I could read it again to see if I "get it" more the second time around, but I probably won't.

read half of this before i gave up. i just couldn't get into it...

Shreya Punj

Imagine you’re walking towards your home, aware that it’s going to rain. Just as you’re about to enter your building, the skies burst open and a few droplets of water fall on your head. Now you’re aware of the weather but you’ve hardly been touched by it. That’s what I felt when I was reading this book. 

Pithy paragraphs, some good, some bad and some just written to sound…smart. Some sentences did stick with me and I found myself chuckling at an observation or two, but I didn’t really connect to anything in particular. 

A decent, one-time read, good for anyone with a short attention span.

Shona Tiger

It's beautiful.

I loved this book! Another quick weekend read between things, it charmed me to bits. It’s quirky, has the most interesting style, and is very clever without being demanding. So glad I got round to it.

There are some heavy subjects in here: addiction and mental health struggles, politics (Trump but not Trump), racism, a near-affair, and eco-anxiety, although it isn’t dealt with head-on. All done deftly, with a light touch. It feels a bit like stream-of-consciousness, or diary entries, which makes the book very readable.

Aware that this book is not to everyone's taste.

Katie Chua

i loved this, i want to write something like this, i wish this never ended tbh, i could've kept reading it 

although...note to self: stop reading books that contemplate the end of the world/climate crisis right before bed

"the problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. the question being: is this really the room you want to spend your life in?"

"young person worry: what if nothing i do matters?

old person worry: what if everything i do does?"

Fraser Simons

What a strange book. While there are small plot points that happen, it’s mostly a stream of consciousness from one character as time advances and the closer climate change events will occur. It jumps around with these wildly disparate thoughts, like the main characters transient emotions and anxieties. It’s always interesting and has a contemplative quality throughout. You learn a lot about the character despite the strange, almost-but-not-quite-absent narrative. It’s quirky and sometimes funny. Enjoyable and strange.

From the author of Dept. of Speculation, a dazzling and deadpan new novel about hope and despair, fear and comfort as it plays out in these times of environmental and political turbulence.

A Novel

nina

like a fictional version of notes from an apocalypse by mark o'connell. had some lovely prose though. will be chanting "they say when you're lonely you start to lose words" for the foreseeable future.

i think maybe i need to reread this again to fully pick up on everything its trying to do and i think when i do it might be 4 stars ?? maybe. bc rather than a full plotted story, it’s a series of fragmented vignettes giving us a glimpse into the characters life and humanity. so to like this book at all you have to be okay with the floaty structure and jumping around in time. 

but anyway i loved the free form, it felt like reading a story and a journal at the same time! so to me it was interesting to get to see these snippets which explored the main characters views on society and it’s issues and the anxiety that comes along with it in ordinary life

Cindy Lieberman

A short, strange book about these strange times as seen through the eyes of an insecure, uncredentialed librarian of the sandwich generation (son, mother and often-addicted brother) living in a rapidly changing Brooklyn. Empathetic, she tries to help those around her whilst doing little for her own situation. Much of it is stream of consciousness, inner monologue and tidbits from books and articles the character has read (or podcasts listened to) with an emphasis on what “preppers” are doing to prepare for the coming apocalypse. No, not the current COVID-19 pandemic, but the effects of extreme climate change. Disturbing all the same.

maggie

the format of this book is so sporadic yet it retains so much of its depth; a metaphorical doomsday looms over the plot of this story while it still manages to stay fresh and light. so hopeful and so human. really made me think and look up at the sky a bit more.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

I've loved everything that Jenny Offill has written, and Weather is no exception. She has completely mastered the autofiction concept in a way that is only rivaled by Rachel Cusk. The difference is that the hallmark of Offill's writing its taught, pared-down character. Her prose is always pristine, every word perfectly chosen ever sentence and scene balanced. In Weather we meet Lizzie, a University Librarian who takes on work reading the correspondence for a friend and academic who presents a podcast on Climate Change. Through the lens of the climate emergency and the extreme reactions of both those who believe in or decry it Lizzie worries about the world her son will face. She perfectly captures the way that discussions of climate change intersect with the mundanities of everyday life and the underlying strain that constant concern can cause. Offill's style is so relatable because its fragmentation reflects the way issues, however pressing, drift in and out of our consciousness, how they combine themselves with memories and experiences and sometimes take on a life of their own. It's short, but perfectly formed.

Ruby Huber

I loved this, I loved that it was short, I loved that it was kinda sad, I loved that it didn’t have a very strong narrative structure! Really captures a moment in time, in the collective psyche. This is written in like. Vignettes? But they feel like snippets that the narrator jotted down in her phone notes throughout her day, in a way that was very good for me. I feel like I didn’t do this an ounce of justice, read it!!

Celine Nguyen ✿

Tremendously funny, tremendously sincere. Immersed in contemporary anxieties—climate change; inequality; Trumpism…although, blessedly, this doesn't do the thing nearly all books have done since 2015, where they throw in a conspicuous self-conscious, painfully serious mention of Trump. As if the author is reneging on their moral duties by not mentioning him. Jenny Offill is oblique and elegant when she invokes the political climate, and makes political anxieties just one aspect of a whole tapestry of worries.

Why read a book about worries? It's so funny, seriously; it sneaks up on you when the protagonist makes dry little remarks about podcast nerds and singularity nerds and preppers and parents who want their kids to achieve a little too badly, and and and…all the kinds of people we might be, that we might surround ourselves with, that we love and laugh at a little. Weather has been compared to Rachel Cusk's trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos). Well: they're both autofiction. But Rachel Cusk's portrayal of other people is usually devastatingly critical and fluorescently aggressive. In Jenny Offill's writing, you see people clearly—all their quiet failings, their inadequacies—in the most gentle, tender way. It felt nice to be immersed in the narrator's social world, and see her dependent and depended on on by others.

There is a plot, but I tend to think that reading autofiction isn't really about the plot but more about…the vibe, maybe? You have to sustain yourself on the peculiar and delightful way Offill writes and let the story unpack from small observations, small jokes, small tragedies, small joys. If you want a beautifully written, fragmentary kind of experience—immersive, ambient, like the title Weather—this is a really lovely book.

Hala Abdulaziz 

This has a stream of consciousness kinda of writing style, and I feel like not a lot of people would be into this kind of thing.. 
but i liked it, I liked it because I got to know the character in a totally different way, i got to know her through passing thoughts, inconsequential conversations, and the seemingly mundane tasks and things she focuses on. 
It's little dark at times, a little depressing even; but it was refreshing in a way, almost like I've blended my life with hers for the few hours I spent reading this book.

Linn 

i was already not vibing with the fragmented writing style, was very bored, and then the author tried to do commentary on immigration in the strangest way ever which was just so ??????

Weather

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