User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Meditative. Reminds me of Renata Adler. A bit too free form for me but the book’s overall project is interesting. I admire Offill’s intelligence and razor sharp wit which this book has in abundance.
Rating: really liked it
2.5 if we're getting specific
i'm unsure how to feel about this one. it is an interesting portrayal of family and parenthood set against the turbulent backdrop of the 2016 election. the uncertainty, bordering on fear, that drives the narrator was palpable. yet, i struggle with this free form, experimental type of literary fiction. the fragmented writing combined with the loose plot threads that barely hold this narrative together are disengaging and i found it hard to connect with this story and the characters within. in two months or so it feels like i will not remember 85% of this, which is sad because it is quite timely.
all that being said, jenny offill has an undeniable handle on language and isn't wary of going outside the box. i would try another book from her at some point to see if i have more success.
Rating: really liked it
weather noun: the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time
weather transitive verb: to come safely through a difficult period or experience
“First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not a coral.” I loved every minute of
Weather. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, thanks to the choppy style, specific brand of humour and refusal to deliver conventional narrative movement, but I thought it was brilliant.
This novel is both sardonic and warm, reflective of our anxious times but also strangely reassuring. It’s got wit and wisdom and a fantastic narrative voice in librarian Lizzie.
There
are plot threads—Lizzie meets an attractive stranger; supports her addict brother; works as an assistant for the charismatic Sylvia who hosts a climate change podcast called “Hell or High Water”; becomes obsessed with doomsday preppers—but these threads don't go very far. This is a novel more concerned with potentialities, the tension of the time before, of something
about to happen. This extends not just to domestic worries, but an impending existential doom.
Inaction and indecision permeate
Weather, as does the ‘incredulity response’: the human tendency to freeze up in a crisis, the brain unable to take in what is happening. As much as this novel delights in absurdity, its comedy is freighted with darkness.
“A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”
Rating: really liked it
Jenny Offill is amazing! So excited to read more of her stuff!
Rating: really liked it
When one reads as many book as I do, the search for something different but good, is ongoing. This author seems to fill the bill. She takes the reader inside the thoughts of a young woman, Lizzie, who is juggling many of life's trials. She is a mother, a wife, tried to take care of her mother, and her brother who has had a problem with drugs. Additionally, the doomsday prediction with the climate and the unfriendly political situation, also preys on her mind. She works in a university library, sans degree, due to the help of her mentor, and has been convinced to answer letters by said mentor, with a podcast called, Hell or high water. She is a very busy, too busy, young woman. She is also a character that is very relateable.
The book is written in snippets of thoughts, an inner monologue that skips from thought to thought. When one ponders this way of writing fiction, this structure, one realizes that this is the way one thinks. Our inner thoughts actually are like this, we don't think in a long diatribe but often short observations.
I really enjoyed this, not only does it make for a quick read, but it was never boring. It also adequately captured what was going on in her life, in an unusual but effective format. We can see just how much she is struggling for balance in this too busy life, and how she handles the many different strands.
ARC by publisher.
Rating: really liked it
Almost the BluesWhat the new world of literary America consists of perhaps: diary entries; the not quite aphorisms of a typical NYC life; the recording of trivia amidst cataclysmic events. There is obviously a selection of things to be noted/published. But there are no conclusions or points to be made. Whatever story there is is left to the reader’s imagination. Blanks are filled in and events connected by the same process that one unconsciously corrects errors and typos in print copy.
Weather is a sort of literary phenomenology, an attempt to present just what occurs to consciousness. In this case, the consciousness of a university librarian of middle-age, middle-income, middle-brow, and middle of the road politics during the election of Donald Trump.
“Everything is happening much faster than expected,” says one of the bit-players. There is confusion and consternation; but life goes on.
It is only the various nutcases whom the librarian encounters who are concerned about ‘the big picture.’
“But what’s going to happen to the American weather?” one red-faced man cries. Another promotes the GOOD NEWS of some evangelical sect. A good friend and mentor is all about something to do with Native American rights (or is it environmental issues?) and needs help responding to the thousands of emails from her fans worried about every conceivable physical, environmental, and spiritual disaster.
“Take care of your teeth,” the dotty neighbour warns. And life goes on.
Pressing issues nag from every side: how to spot a terrorist; emigration to Israel; engaging with plans for world peace; dealing with the unpleasantness of individual human beings on the subway. Then there’s the tedium of dealing with an addicted brother whose primary talent is haplessness. The television and YouTube provide distractions - from the most effective forms of self-harm to the monks of Mount Athos to Buddhist practice to sex robots. Whom to choose to accompany you on your apocalyptic ‘doomstead’ is a chronic worry. Planning for disaster is never finished. And life, of course, goes on.
My opinion: these people are pretty far up their own backsides. Not being able to decide what is important is a fatal condition. Such downtrodden lives. From the Have a Heart humane mousetrap to the coy liaison with the sexy French Canadian, it’s all too tragically precious. 1960’s Frisco hippiedom morphed into 21st century Brooklyn Heights grandchildren. Life does go on for these folk. Thank goodness it isn’t mine.
Rating: really liked it
I don't think this is a bad book at all, I want to make that clear right away. I think Jenny Offill is a talented writer, and that she achieves everything she set out to achieve with this little book, a potent commentary on the impossibility of balancing every day domesticity with encroaching anxiety about the climate crisis.
But with that said... I didn't particularly like it? I mostly found this book incredibly forgettable. It was a short, breezy read, but for whatever reason I didn't have time to read it in a single sitting, and every time I put it down and picked it back up, I couldn't remember where I had left off. I had to constantly remind myself who was who - Ben, Eli, Henry, I think were their names, but even now I couldn't tell you who was the husband, brother, and son - and there was nothing about Lizzie's story in particular that justified to me why this was the particular story that Offill chose to tell. I ultimately just needed a bit more from it, but I think that's on me rather than the author. Maybe I've just read a few too many navel-gazing literary novels lately for this to shine through.
Rating: really liked it
NOW AVAILABLE!!
Can I ask you something, Will says one night and I sure, ask me something.
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a fucking librarian.”
fun fact about that line, beyond the “fuck, yeah!” of it in my heart: the verb between “I” and “sure” is missing in my ARC, so the quote is totes [
sic], but i’m 2/3 convinced that the word was intentionally omitted. as the novel draws to its close (and that is on page 170 of the ARC's 201 pages), and as the sense of anxiety and fragmentation that is the modern condition—in the novel's world and our own—escalates, the number of ‘typos’—missing words, punctuation, etc, also increase, so they seem to be functioning as orthographic echoes of what is happening to the novel’s characters and
their our world—just one more example of everything falling apart. and maybe it's a coincidence or a copyeditor rushing through the end, but it feels intentional, particularly since there's an earlier line*,
They say when you're lonely you start to lose words... if i’m wrong, oh well, and you can blame NYU's undergrad english program for conditioning me to look too hard at shit all those years ago. and to think it is acceptable to drop douchey phrases like “orthographic echoes” into a review. and now i have gone on a tangent just because i didn't want anyone to think that missing word was because of my own carelessness. doubledouche.
douchiness aside, i wouldn’t ordinarily read into this situation, but this is a book that knows just what it’s doing; it’s deceptively slight, with short, scattershot paragraphs telling a story but also working double-time with tonal subtext (is that a thing?)(and if it is, is it douchey?), building emotional atmosphere in scenes that seem innocently everyday on the surface, but low-level ominous when viewed as a whole.
My son comes in to show me something. It looks like a pack of gum, but it's really a trick. When you try to take a piece, a metal spring snaps down on your finger. "It hurts more than you think," he warns me.
Ow.
i mean, it's not foreshadowing, this isn't chekhov's gum gag or anything, but many of the book's short paragraphs could stand alone as prose poems, building emotional weight, meaning more than their simplicity appears, hindsight and subtext and yadda, oh my.
i’d heard wonderful things about this author, but had never read her before, and when my back said "no" about getting out of bed last week**, i figured this would be a good opportunity to check her out; a one-
sittinglying book about a lapsed-academic turned librarian responding to the questions of inhabitants of a world on the precipice of disaster, and trying to hold it all together whilst her personal life also unravels.
and it is gooooood.
the end.
May You Be Among the Survivors.* which i just realized is on page 169—i.e. the page
before that quote, so i'm pointing the finger of textual support, BOOM!
** and before you ask—all of this handwringing about ARE THEY OR ARE THEY NOT TYPOS??? was
before i gobbled the pain pills.
*************************************
a wonderful single-sitting book to read when a busted back keeps you abed.
review to come.
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
Jenny Offill`s Weather is an entertaining and a thought-provoking read. The book, in many ways, represents the current uncertain times, particularly the climate, healthcare and political situation. It also points us to take these ambiguous states in our stride, and go forward.
The narrator is Lizzie Benson is a University campus librarian who is creative, curious and `knows-it-all`.
Weather covers a lot of topics, subjects, issues, concerns and ideas – but the overarching indication is that it is going to a turbulent and bumpy ride and we got to be prepared for it!
Rating: really liked it
And now for something completely different…Strange little novel that had me in the palm of its hand. There’s not really a plot, but sometimes, who needs one? Plot lovers, please don’t be scared off. It’s full of insights that are accessible and fascinating, and there is a story thread, I promise.
You probably want to know, what’s the thread? The thread is Librarian Lizzie’s life as a wife, mother, professional letter writer, and helper of her brother, who is trying to stay clean. Amid all of this, we’re a fly on the wall of her head, hearing her musings. Her head goes everywhere—from thinking about normal activities in her family to bemoaning the scary shape of our planet. There are random thoughts and facts, observations on life, even a few jokes. It sort of seemed like a well-thought-out journal. Lizzie is concerned, but she doesn’t go off the deep end—that would be a whole different book. Instead, her mind is just plain lively, her thoughts irresistible.
The language is simple but the things she talks about are complex. She doesn’t go all academic on us, though, to my complete happiness. It’s a little headier than I like, but strangely I didn’t mind—probably because she isn’t hoity-toity. What she does is very skillful, yet it seems effortless.
Offill manages to infuse it all with the anxiety, frustration, and sadness surrounding big issues, like climate change and current politics. She also throws in an odd fact here and there, things you wish you’d remember if you ever get to be on Jeopardy.
Here’s a fun fact (I fact-checked this, lol, and it is indeed true):
“There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.”Here’s a bit of wisdom:
“My friend who works in hospice says don’t tell dying people they won’t be around for the beach trip, apples in fall, etc. No more do that than knock a crutch out from under a person with a broken leg.”And here is some hilarity:
“…the government has restrictions about what you can name your kid. Sex Fruit and Fat Boy are forbidden. Violence and Number 16 Bus Shelter are okay...I’m going to name the baby Fat Sex Bus, he tells me.”I’ve been meaning to read an earlier book by Offill, Dept. of Speculation, which has lots of positive reviews. I didn’t rush to read it, though, because it sounded like it was just a bunch of snippets. I figured it would an author who spit out philosophies and gazed at belly buttons—no thanks. I usually don’t like reality snippets mixed up in my make-believe. Now, I’ve moved this one way up in my queue. If it’s anything like Weather, I’ll be in pig heaven.
I just loved this book to death. If she writes another book (man, I hope she does), I’ll be the first in line. My only complaint is that the book is so short. Fast readers can probably even read this one in one sitting.
Highly recommended.
Thanks to Edelweiss for the advance copy.
Rating: really liked it
Loved it!!!
Audiobook/ sync... with the physical book.
The audio-narration is read by Cassandra Campbell....( a well known pro in the audiobook-world).
This is not an easy book to review....
My guess is that readers will either appreciate and enjoy it....
Or....
They won’t.
I enjoyed “Dept. of Speculation”....so I had a pretty good idea of what I might be getting into — “Unconventional Unique beauty”....
This book exceeded my expectations. I liked it even more!
It really ‘is’ like poetry .... and/ or perhaps one might say it’s similar to short stories - or stream-of consciousness - writing.
How many FAKE SHRINKS do you know? Come on....you must be able to think of at least one of your friends who earns the title...right?/!
Or.... maybe ‘you’re’ the best well known fake shrink you know—-in that case: good for you!
Lizzie Benson is the fake shrink librarian you’ll meet in “Weather”.
You’ll meet Lizzie’s brother, sister-in-law, husband, child, and a podcast star.
As to what this book is about .... well, on any given day, or hour, my answer might change.
Sorry folks....it’s a book to be experienced. I think it’s easier to discuss with others who have already read it....( analyze some of the sentences for fun)...rather than try to explain this book in a review.
Instead .....here are a few teaser sentences, ( not exactly perfectly quoted, but ‘close’), and in no chronological order ——to ‘anything’.
....”Maybe I can stop having that dream now…the one where my brother shows up and says, ‘I can die now’”.
....”I hate weddings because I cry and drink too much… But this time I got lucky, Catherine got pregnant and they had a wedding at City Hall”.
....A woman in her 40s was told by a doctor that she needed to improve her health. He said that she should go jogging 2 miles every day. Two weeks later she went back to see the doctor. He asked how she was doing. She said she was doing pretty well, except she was 28 miles from home.
.... “People call our neighborhood ‘Little Pakistan’... but not the people who live here”.
....”Nothing lasts forever… But an exception is made for the earth and sky”
....It’s Monopoly day”
....”Lately I observe that I dress like the kids on campus for maybe they dress like me”.
....”Breathing in....and breathing out.... I know I cannot escape old age. I know that I am of the nature of getting sick, I know that I am at the nature to die, breathing out, I know that I cannot escape dying.
“Weather” is about many things...life, marriage, parenthood, family, friendship, aging, climate change, fears, hope, and acceptance.
It’s tragic and sad at times, humorous, and thought-provoking ....
Mostly ....I think it’s beautifully real!
I’m started to have a girl crush on Jenny Offill
Rating: really liked it
I stayed up past midnight to finish, exhilarated by the prose, and excited about every exquisite perfect detail, and eager for the perceptions and the recognitions that came tumbling along on every page...and now I'm done, and I just don't know. I don't think I'm going to remember this in a year. The tiny paragraphs of insight, one after another, remind me a little too much of Twitter. "Good Twitter," but still.
Reading this novel was like watching a gentle rain falling on a pond.
Rating: really liked it
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a fucking librarian.” Hell yeh! How could I not love a book with those words!
Weather is an enjoyable and quick read, perfect for when you find it hard to concentrate. I know many of us are finding it difficult to get into books at the moment. I don't know how many books I've begun and set aside this past week. From page one of this book however, I was able to concentrate almost 100%. It reads sort of like a journal because our protagonist is sharing her thoughts as she goes about her days. There are a lot of fun facts included -- she's a librarian so of course she knows everything! Actually, I do want to point out though.... Lizzy informs us that for a toothache, you can crush aspirin and place it on the tooth. Nope, please don't do that! Librarians might know a lot but we don't know everything.
Last week, I had a very deep filling fall out and the tooth is hurting some. Even if my dentist was still seeing patients, there's no way in hell I'll go right now. Therefore, I was thrilled to come across this tidbit in the book. Thankfully the librarian in me has to validate everything, check the best sources. Aspirin will burn your gums so please don't listen to Lizzy on this one!
Weather is quirky and witty even if not laugh-out-loud funny. I enjoyed reading about the different characters who enter Lizzy's life, either in her personal life or through her job at the library. There was one laugh-out-loud moment for me about "an elderly gentleman who keeps asking me to give him the password for his own email? I try to explain that it is not possible for me to know."
Yup, that happens. People think we know everything, including their passwords! More than once I've had patrons get angry at me because I didn't know their passwords. I had someone scream at me: Why the hell don't you know, you're a librarian!? And then proceed to argue with me that he
knew I knew the password but was just refusing to tell it to him because I didn't want him to be able to check his email. One woman drove me insane for a week because she forgot her Facebook password every day. Every day I would help her re-set it and asked her to write it down so she would remember. Every day she lost the paper. I finally asked if she would like me to keep the password for her and she wanted to know why I wanted to get into her Facebook, did I want to spy on her?! (She had some paranoia problems.) After that, she gave up on Facebook because she knew the government was hacking into it anyway.
I can identify with Lizzy in her almost obsession for planning ahead. For instance, she's terrified about climate change and can't stop thinking about how she can protect her family from the worst of it. Should they up and move to southern Argentina ahead of the crowds?
I think Lizzy feels a bit out of control over events in her life and so she obsesses about planning ahead, something I can relate to. Something perhaps most of us can relate to. When there is much uncertainty, we feel a lack of control and our brains go into overtime trying to find a way to get in control of the situation. Sometimes though, we just have to accept that there are things beyond our control. We can't save everyone. We can't plan for every contingency. That is frustrating and frightening, especially for those of us who are control freaks. However, accepting our limitations can bring about a calmer state of mind and thus a healthier state of being.
I'm glad I read this book now instead of pre-pandemic times (is it just me or does it seem like that was years instead of months ago?!). It reminded me to take a breath and let go of trying to change the things I cannot change.
Perhaps that makes it sound like a heavy read, but it is not. It's light and fun and easy to get pulled into. There's not much of a plot but that was OK. I wavered between 4 and 5 stars; it's more of 4.5 but I'll bump it up.
Rating: really liked it
Now shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize.
I joined a Radio 4 Book Club virtual discussion of Jenny Offill’s 2014 second novel “Dept of Speculation” (shortlisted for the Folio Prize); and, this, her third novel “Weather” appeared on a number of 2020-preview lists.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00...
This book is very much in the style of Dept. of Speculation – which I described in my review of that book as an elliptical and aphoristic style.
Offil said in many interviews around Dept. of Speculation that she enjoys wandering the non-fiction aisles of university libraries, pulling books and random, and noting any facts which catch her interest and she can use in her books.
Here she embraces that idea by making her main character a University librarian.
Lizzie gets a side job supporting her ex research supervisor - a climate change podcaster Sylvia. She accompanies her to summits and meetings, meeting the super-rich and their response to the climate emergency, a world of rewilding, technological singularity, transhumanism, floating cities, geo-engineering. She also answers her emails and post, which in turn introduces her to a different approach to the same topic – the world of survival hacks, doomsteads, doomsday preppers.
Lizzie’s marriage falters a little – due to her excessive involvement (at one stage she takes an “enmeshment” test) with the life of her addict brother, which takes a more dramatic turn as he struggles with being a new-father. Her insistence on taking on the burden of her brother, is I think reflected in her views on climate change – taking on the burdens of the human race.
“I let my brother choose the movie for once, but then it’s so stupid I can barely watch it. In the movies he likes there is always some great disaster about to happen and only one unlikely person who can stop it.”
And climate change, in keeping with the book’s style is addressed elliptically and aphoristically, some examples:
First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not coral
It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.
My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay
Of the anthropological driver of climate change:
Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer. You don’t say.
Of her own attempts to process the emergency:
The disaster psychologist explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.
Of the difficulty of understanding the time frame over which climate change is emerging:
A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”
It seems almost impossible to review this book – without comparing and contrasting it to Lucy Ellmans’s Goldsmith Prize winning, Booker shortlisted “Ducks, Newburyport”.
Both feature an American female wife and mother as a narrator, both focus almost obsessively on environmental issues, on the election of Trump and what the two together say about modern America, both obsessed that this is the worst-of-times (in direct contradiction to almost every possible statistical measure that can be used), both mix the profound with the mundane, both interleave trivia with domesticity and with world events.
However whereas Ellmann has a comprehensive, all-inclusive, stream-of-consciousness style, representing the narrator’s though process, with nothing edited or filtered; by contrast Offill’s style is all about the filter and edit – it is a book which has been edited down to almost nothing, where much of the action takes place in the spaces between paragraphs.
I am not clear which book I enjoyed the most. This is a much easier and more intellectually stimulating read, but also a more ephemeral and insubstantial one.
Why only four stars. My disconnect with this book, as with Ducks, Newburyport ultimately I think comes down to the narrator’s (and I assume author’s) worldview, which in its despair lacks a faith in the future that I feel. In “Weather” in particular this is captured in a dismissal of a profound challenge (which in the appendix is correctly assigned to John Piper) with a curt “Yup”. And that unfortunately is a “Nope” to a fifth star.
My thanks to Granta Publications for an ARC via NetGalley.
Rating: really liked it
Now Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020Jenny Offill describes what it feels like to live in today's America, she writes about the political and social weather, the charged atmosphere that has enveloped the nation. Her protagonist Lizzie Benson works as a librarian without a traditional degree, thus administrating knowledge without being formally qualified - but, in the metaphorical sense, who really is? In the age of fragmented filter bubbles and the rise of hate, Lizzie also navigates her roles as wife and mother while trying to help her brother, a recovering addict with the need for overwhelming emotional support. And then her old academic mentor Sylvia Liller hires her to answer her fan mail, written by various listeners of her podcast "Hell and High Water" about the state of affairs.
Lizzie tries to keep up with the demands, tries to come to terms with the world around her, all the impressions, emotions and events that exhaust her powers. She aims to fulfill everybody's needs, has supported her ailing mother, dropped out of graduate school to save her brother, now wants to be a loving wife to her game designer husband and mother to her smart little boy, she wants to help keep her brother clean, plus she is eager to do a good job at the library and answering the mail for Sylvia - the messages that arrive add additional voices of fear, doom and anger that intrude Lizzie's thoughts. Then there is a range of minor characters, from enigmatic car service owner Mr. Jimmy to the clients at the library, for whom Lizzie feels different kinds of responsibility.
This is a well-constructed book full of witty and often funny descriptions that aim to illustrate the emotional and psychological toll our time takes, both for the individual and for families. Of course, the title also refers to climate change, an issue that troubles Lizzie. Still, I didn't really warm to this text. This might come down to personal taste - the novel is certainly clever, but I didn't find it particularly gripping and had to make a conscious effort to concentrate on the text as I wasn't immersed in the writing, partly because the story itself takes a backseat and the atmosphere, the title-giving weather, is the real star. All in all, this is a very intelligent and clever book, but it didn't fully win me over.
