Book notes

Category: Fiction

  • On the Calculation of Volume I

    (by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland) When this book opens, Tara Selter is experiencing the same day—November 18th—for the 121st time. She tells us about her day—this 121st iteration of it— and a bit about who she is in normal life: she lives in a small town in France with her husband; they are…

  • The Hypocrite

    (by Jo Hamya) Sophia, who’s in her late twenties, is a playwright whose play is being performed in a theater in London. Her father, who’s a novelist in his early sixties who hasn’t published a book in a while, is at the theater for a matinee performance; he knows nothing of what the play is…

  • Two short reads

    Yesterday I realized that reading short things on the Kindle app on my phone is an excellent way to pass the time when waiting for a concert to start if I’m at a show by myself and don’t have actual book I’m reading with me (because it’s a hardcover and there’s no way that thing…

  • Heated Rivalry

    (by Rachel Reid) OK, this one was more my speed than Game Changer was. And I mean, I liked Game Changer, but I feel like Scott and Kip both have such golden retriever energy. Like, so earnest and eager and wholesome. And that’s fun and all, but the Shane/Ilya dynamic of rivals who hook up…

  • Game Changer

    (by Rachel Reid) I haven’t watched the Heated Rivalry show at all, but I was looking for a fun February read and this definitely delivered. At the start of the book we meet Kip, who’s working at a juice bar making smoothies (though he’d rather be doing something that actually uses his history degree). One…

  • Netherland

    (by Joseph O’Neill) Very close to the start of this book, the narrator gets a phone call in which he learns that someone he was friends with when he lived in New York is dead: and not just dead, but a murder victim. This is 2006, and the narrator, Hans, is back in London and…

  • The Third Policeman

    (by Flann O’Brien) At the very start of this book we learn that the narrator is a murderer: he tells us in the first line how he “killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with [a] spade.” We then learn a bit more about the events in his life that preceded this crime: a…

  • Archipelago of the Sun

    (by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) The first book I read in 2025 was Suggested in the Stars, which is the second book in a trilogy by Tawada (I’d read the first book back in 2022), so it feels fitting that I closed the year out with this one, which is the third of…

  • The Ocean Is Everyone’s But It Is Not Yours

    (by Dave Eggers) At the start of this novella we meet Aurora, who’s been in charge of her dad’s whale watching business for the past two years, since his retirement. Business isn’t booming, but it’s steady, both for Aurora and for her friend Declan, whose “looser and boozier” tours leave from the same pier. There…

  • Lessons in Magic and Disaster

    (by Charlie Jane Anders) I think the three storylines of this novel and the way the narrative switches between them made it a slow start for me, but once I was about halfway into the book I was fully invested. In one storyline we have Jamie, who’s working on her PhD dissertation and also trying…