{"id":11759,"date":"2021-07-22T17:30:57","date_gmt":"2021-07-22T21:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=11759"},"modified":"2021-07-22T17:30:57","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T21:30:57","slug":"weather-by-jenny-offill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/weather-by-jenny-offill\/","title":{"rendered":"Weather by Jenny Offill"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a companion website for this book<\/a>, there’s a quote from Thomas Merton’s journals that includes the phrase “I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place,” which I like a lot (I should really read more by Merton one of these days) and which feels very relevant to this book. Weather<\/i> is partly about the narrator, Lizzie’s, preoccupation with and dread about climate change. But it’s also about a general mood of anxiety, related to a number of things, from politics (the book is set around the 2016 US presidential election) to family worries (Lizzie’s brother is a recovering addict; she’s also worried about her mom) to everyday life stuff (dread about going to the dentist, dread about a dermatologist’s appointment). <\/p>\n

The style of the prose works for me: the book is made of little snippets, mostly Lizzie’s first-person narrative but also other things (stuff Lizzie’s reading, or pieces from her second job\u2014she works in a university library but also starts helping her former grad school prof\/advisor, Sylvia, answer emails about the climate-related podcast Sylvia hosts, and we see pieces of the questions\/answers related to that work) and I think the style lets Offill change topic or tone quickly, adding bits of humor or depth (plus it’s just an appealing style to me, in general). I do think there are maybe a few too many strands\u2014the portions of the plot tied to Sylvia felt a little too loosely-connected, and I feel like Sylvia ends up being a plot device to explain Lizzie’s increasing fascination with\/focus on doomsday prepping. But overall I found this a quick and satisfying read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a companion website for this book, there’s a quote from Thomas Merton’s journals that includes the phrase “I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place,” which I like a lot (I should really read more by Merton one of these days) and which feels very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}