Book notes

Category: Fiction

  • On the Calculation of Volume III

    (by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell) When this book opens, Tara Selter has been stuck in the eighteenth of November for more than three years, and she feels like she might always be stuck in it. But something’s different: at the end of the last volume, she met someone else…

  • What We Can Know

    (by Ian McEwan) For much of Part One of What We Can Know, I wondered if maybe I would rather be re-reading Possession by A.S. Byatt instead—my memories of that one are dim but I remember it having a similar set-up, in that both this book and that one are novels whose protagonists are academics…

  • On the Calculation of Volume II

    (by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland) In the first volume of this book, Tara Selter, who’s stuck in a time loop where she keeps waking up on November 18, suggested to her husband that maybe they should go to Paris together, since that’s where the time loop started for her and maybe if she…

  • 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…