On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) - Solvej Balle

A quick note to say that if you would like to help me with the running costs of the book group, you can give a small contribution via Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/annabookgroup or PayPal: anna_savva@live.co.uk

Thank you to everyone who helped me with the Meetup fees in 2024.

We will meet from 6:30pm onwards in the room upstairs. Please check with the bar staff before going up that the room is ready for us and please don't go up before our start time. We will start the discussion at around 7:00pm and talk about the book for an hour or so before having a break. Then we can vote on next month's book.

If you have any suggestions for short(ish) books for the next shortlist, please message me ahead of time.

Thanks!

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On the Calculation of Volume - Solvej Balle (2020, 164 pages)

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18 she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

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Brighton Rock - Graham Greene (1938, 269 pages)

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'.

My Ántonia - Willa Cather (1918, 219 pages)

Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.

The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers (1946, 163 pages)

Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin—not to mention her own unbridled imagination—Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself.

The novel that became an award-winning play and a major motion picture and that has charmed generations of readers, Carson McCullers's classic The Member of the Wedding is now available in small-format trade paperback for the first time.