Funny Weather

Art in an Emergency

De: Olivia Laing

Narrado por: Sophie Aldred

"One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction" (Harper's Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous 21st century.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the 21st century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

©2020 Olivia Laing (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Wonderful text/ very irritating narration

This narrator does fake voices for famous artists throughout the text which is frankly just absurd and takes the listener out of the piece every time she does it. Seems like an overeager actress trying to find something performative in the job of reading a text, but the effect is to make these amazing figures of art history sound almost like jokes whenever they are quoted.

Narrator's mispronunciations drove me crazy

Not only is the voice of this narrator unsuited to the story itself -- she sounds very prim and proper, in contrast to the author's words and life -- but she mispronounces words so often that I had to stop listening. Couldn't she at least learn how to say David Bowie's name correctly? It's not hard! Listening to her mispronounce Bowie's name again and again set my teeth on edge. It is not pronounced like the bough of a tree. A pity, really. If this had been the only mispronounced word perhaps I would have been able to soldier on but alas, no. I feel bad for the author having had this narrator represent her book and voice so poorly.