May Reading List - “How’s the Weather?”

If you’re asking generally on the East Coast this week, then I’d say “pretty good.” But if you’re asking about Jenny Offil’s novel “Weather”—then boy oh boy do I have a reading list for you.

“Weather”

Jenny Offill, 2021

Those of you in the old guard may remember this book in a “other resources” list from the first year of the patreon (back when reading lists were staggering, wildly over-ambitious things). But like the clouds featured on the cover of this book (or looming, formless dread featured in the pages), Offill’s story drifted back into my life after a series of conversations with artists renewed my interest in exploring how to compose works addressing climate change.

Offill’s style often consists of interweaving different snippets of streams of consciousness - her characters circle the drain of a few running preoccupations, which often seem to exacerbate each other or gradually merge into something larger and omnipresent. Her books are also funny, strange, captivating, blisteringly fast to read and very difficult to excerpt to any effect; I’ve tried and tried to take a piece for Telelibrary, but the genius of her work is how cumulative it is. Your sense of the character, the story, and the vibe of the book build and build, one tiny piece at a time.

RELATED READING

JENNY OFFILL in conversation with Brit Marling

City Arts & Lectures

I first learned about this author from this lecture, way back in 2021. The conversation was far reaching and profound, and at the time felt like a strikingly new perspective on the COVID pandemic. It was the first time I felt I heard someone balance respect for inestimable loss of the current moment with hope for the ways we may learn to live smaller from this time of contraction. When creating art around climate change, I think most artists feel they must carefully walk the line on the “hope to despair spectrum.” Offill’s work somehow seems to do both at times, and maybe never better than in this conversation

Something New Under the Sun

Alexandra Kleeman

“But Yannick,” you cry; “what if I have a constant need to feel climate anxiety? What will I do when I finish ‘Weather?’” Well, you can get a head start on what’s sure to make a future appearance on a reading list — Alexandra Kleeman’s book feels a bit like if Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Gilliam, and David Attenborough had a child, and that child took a road trip to LA.

Surreal, disturbing, near-future dystopia that feels far too near (for bonus discomfort, try reading while traveling to Los Angeles like I did), it’s a strange book that doesn’t work like most things I’ve read. Ultimately, that oddity will be staying with me—and perhaps like the end of an old-fashioned Mass; “and also with you.”