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Finally the dreaded laundry was done. It took just over a hour, including the soaking (babad). So many dreaded tasks would not be daunting at all if we did them immediately, instead of putting them off so they grow more and more intimidating with each day.

I am writing this with a fountain pen. I’d forgotten I owned fountain pens, which I bought with gift certificates. Yes, I have worked for GCs, all my nice things were bought with GCs.

Our book club met on Zoom to discuss our March selection: Weather by Jenny Offill. It’s a novel in the form of a diary by a librarian/ex-PhD student who has a side gig answering correspondence for a podcast on climate change. The entries are short, almost tweet-like, moving from the mundane details of her life to the enormity of the climate catastrophe we face. There’s not much plot, though there is a nice husband who works from home, a child, a dog, an ex-addict brother, and a flirtation (“Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandana on a stick.”). The story is How we live in the end times—the most dramatic storyline I can think of, everything a matter of life and death, rendered almost casually. But there is nothing casual about Offill’s prose: it is a marvel of compression. The prose is, to use the overused word correctly, curated. Where other writers go on and on as if they were paid per word, Offill’s sentences have a spreading density. I’m thinking of the Big Bang: a universe beginning with a singularity. She can say things without saying them, you sense the meanings in the silences. Weather is a deceptively light novel from inside an apocalypse.

The words that came up most often in our discussion:

Anxiety. Many people find it difficult to focus or even hold on to a thought these days. I don’t want to use the word “normal” because I’ve never liked the concept, so I’ll say its understandable. Even people who usually enjoy reading fiction cannot do so; they can only read news or social media posts about our present reality, which stokes their anxiety some more. Or else parts of the book triggered their anxiety. Someone pointed out that the style of the novel—clipped, disjointed—recalls how one thinks in the grip of anxiety. Sometimes a book can be so much like the external world that it becomes uncomfortable to read.

Privilege. We have lived with this all our lives, taken it for granted, and shoved it in the backs of our minds. Now it is staring us in the face. Being able to work from home is a privilege. Going to the grocery is a privilege. Sheltering in place is a privilege, as is a book club on Zoom.

We agreed that these are not the end times, but a warning. We are seeing all the things that need fixing: unchecked capitalism, absurd inequality, poor health care, political opportunism, and we haven’t even started on climate change. If we do not fix them, then we are really, truly, doomed.

The Bibliophibians Book Club selection for April/May is Eve’s Hollywood. Eve Babitz’s fictionalized memoir of Los Angeles from the 1950s to the 1970s is fun and funny and as far away as we can get from the pandemic. We haven’t set a date for the next meeting yet. Can’t plan more than 48 hours in the future.