Book Beginnings quote:
Friday56 quote:
Summary: Lizzie Benson, the book's narrator, lives in Brooklyn with her husband Ben and son Eli. She works as a college librarian, though she got the job through back channels and never did the course work for it, so the book is filled with funny pieces of information she has unearthed on the job. An example is the Book Beginnings quote which she found doing research on the early days of this country. She dropped out of graduate school to look after her drug-addicted brother and her life is filled with a rising sense of anxiety after the 2016 election and the rise of right-wing strongmen and the effects that climate change is having on life. "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" (NPR).
Review: I listened to Weather on audiobook. In the beginning I didn't understand what was happening because I wasn't seeing the spaces on the pages where her thoughts were separated. Finally, at some point, I just settled in and enjoyed the zaniness of Lizzie's thoughts and could appreciate how disjointed most of them were. Don't we all do that? We are thinking about one thing and then we see something, let's say its a cat, and suddenly our thoughts veer off in a new direction related to felines. The whole book of Weather is like that. Lizzie's thought populate the book and most of her thoughts are disjointed and many of them are hilarious.
The book reviewer for NPR describes Offill as a "master of the glancing blow." So many of her lines could be used in a comedy routine. Here are a few examples: Her nosy neighbor slips and falls during jury duty on a case about slipping and falling; she and her brother are nearly run over in the park, when they complain, the offending driver yells "You and your precious lives."; even the Friday56 quote about the family being afraid they'll see their father die on TV. Everything is a potential zinger.
This is what she has to say, for example, about coming down from a flirtation that was "like a wartime romance. Minus the war. Minus the sex": "And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time." (NPR)I really liked this book but recognize that it is probably too quirky for most readers. But if you are one of those folks who likes something a little off kilter, this is the book for you.
-Anne
