If you are not already experiencing "climate dread," the feeling that you're living in a slow-mo ecological apocalypse that you're powerless to stop, then Jenny Offill's latest novel, Weather, will fill you to the brim with it. Offill places the reader in the mind of Lizzie, a librarian in the big city. When she takes a side gig answering e-mails for her former writing teacher's doomsday podcast, her focus on climate dread and prepping for the end-times begins to consume her. Though some of Offill's jokes and profundities can feel a bit pat, the overall structure of the book is greater than the sum of its parts, offering readers the pleasure of looking back through a diary and realizing that all our apparently disparate anxieties may fall under the umbrella of the larger one: fear of extinction. by Rich Smith