July 11, 2025
On the Calculation of Volume 1, by Solvej Balle
I will only mention Bill Murray this once, and not even name his film’s title that’s become iconic enough to eclipse the film itself, standing in for a narrative approach so overdone that it might be hard to imagine it could be made interesting. And then along comes Danish writer Solvej Balle with a request for us to hold her beer after she, according to a blurb on the back of her novel from LE FIGARO , “went into exile on an island for more than twenty years” and returned with ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, whose first two volumes have been translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, the first of which I read on a camping trip the weekend before last.
The premise is this. Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller, has just spent the last 121 days awakening every morning to another November 18 (alas, without Sonny and Cher). It all started on a business trip to Paris, unfathomably strange. Eventually she makes her way back to the home in Northern France that she shares with her husband, Thomas, who is also her business partner, and when we find her, she is hiding out in her spare room because she eventually tired of having to explain to Thomas day after day what she was doing at home instead of Paris, where she’s supposed to be.
This is a quiet narrative, as confined as Tara is within a single day, a limited geography (though apparently the world expands in subsequent volumes). She comes to know all the patterns, when she’ll hear birdsong, when her husband returns home, what the weather will be, everything always the same, although there are strange deviations—sometimes things she acquires one day travels with her into her next day, and other days these acquisitions disappear. Trying to figure out some kind of pattern or logic beneath what’s happening to her becomes a major preoccupations in the her first 50 days or so, but eventually her energy in that direction peters out.
Tara’s loneliness permeates the text, the relief of finding her beloved Thomas eventually ceasing to satisfy her because she realizes how fundamentally she’s alienated from him, even when they are fortunate enough to be together. She realizes that she’s embarked upon a journey that he cannot be part of, no matter how much he wants to be, no matter how much they love each other—which reminds me of what couples experience when one is undergoing a serious illness or even dying, the impossibility of true togetherness, the meagreness of the togetherness they have.
I happen to be rereading Frankenstein right now, and recognize a similar tone in the two novel’s first-person addresses, Tara too a kind of monster, outside the ordinary, people responding to her situation with confusion and disbelief. She spends the novel similarly skulking in the margins (she refers to herself as a ghost), peering in lit windows, set apart from the ordinariness of human experience which she so longs for.
The Calculation of Volume tells an extraordinary story, but what its narrator goes through will be familiar to many readers, underlining the story’s poignancy. This very specific, unlikely tale brings with it a certain universality. Tara tells us, “It seems so odd to me now how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simple cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case…”
July 9, 2025
Winter (of Strout) in July
In so many ways, Lucy by the Sea was where it all began for me, the #WinterofStrout. Albeit in 2023, when I finally read it after avoiding Lucy Barton for a long time. I’d read My Name is Lucy Barton when it first came out, and I did not like it. But by the time Elizabeth Strout’s third book about Lucy Barton, Lucy by the Sea, was published, I was willing to give them all another chance, so I reread the first book, read the second (Oh, William!), and finally LBTS, which is where all the pieces began to come together.
During my #WinterofStrout, I’ve been reading all of Strout’s books in chronological order, beginning with her lesser known first two novels, Amy and Isabel, and Abide With Me, which I loved so much. And then Olive Kitteridge, and The Burgess Boys, which I’d read before after the first time I reread Lucy by the Sea, because by then I was in love with Bob Burgess. And it was kind of amazing to meet him again upon rereading Lucy by the Sea, to recall meeting him for the first first time in this book, and how I know him so much better know having read so many other Strout novels in which Bob appears—including Tell Me Everything, which came out last fall, and which Lucy by the Sea is like a bridge to. It was also nice to be rereading Lucy by the Sea as my husband is reading The Burgess Boys, both of us side-by-side in bed reading about Bob. I love the intimacy inherent in that.
The part about rereading Lucy by the Sea that was less delightful was how, when I first read the novel in 2023, and the parts about rising political polarization and tensions in American society reaching a boiling point (the novel is set in in 2020 and 2021, the January 6 insurrection unfolding on its pages) it would have made me think, “Ooof, we dodged a bullet there.” Biden was elected in 2020, and I really supposed the chaos was behind us, that people might actually begin to settle down, that William’s observations about the simmering rage of American people resulting from a very human kind of cruelty and also inequality might have been overblown instead of prescient.
I did appreciate how much less viscerally I experienced the 2020 parts about Covid than when I read it in 2023, that so much of that seems far away from where we are now (which is FINE!).
There is so much that’s wild about this book—that it’s the first time I met Charlene Bibber and Kathryn Caskey too. The torture and sadness of Lucy’s love for her daughters, and all the ways she’s failed them, and all the things that they need from each other that none of them are able to give. The way I’m now fascinated with Margaret, Bob’s wife, the Unitarian minister, who Lucy doesn’t really like, and neither did Bob’s sister-in-law, Helen, and she doesn’t come out great in Tell Me Everything, really. I want to read HER story now. How there’s a part in this novel where Lucy quotes a novel she once read, and while she didn’t cite the novel, I recognized it as a line from Olive, Again (“‘I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to…bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”) Imagine the audacity of putting your words from one book in the mouth of a character in another? Imagine how I’d read that line the first time, back when I’d not yet read Olive, Again, and just skimmed right over it like it was no big thing? (And what ELSE did I miss, even this time?)
My #WinterofStrout, stretching all the way to SUMMER, has been such a wonderful, powerful reading experience, lending shape and cohesion to my reading life. I will likely be rereading Tell Me Everything sometime this summer (I read it twice last fall), to see how it reads differently having read all of Strout’s novels now, and no doubt I will find new treasures (and oddities) to discover inside it.
July 7, 2025
This Way Up, by Cathrin Bradbury
Cathrin Bradbury’s memoir This Way Up is an exercise in reorientation, in way-finding. Think about title, the label placed on boxes in transit, a simple instruction to show where the bottom goes. Although the title of the book is also a joke—at age 68, her doctor hands her a drawing labelled “Aging Changes,” and it turns out everything (“muscle mass, blood flow”) is in decline. “The very few times the arrows pointed up were for body fat and bone breaks. The small fibrillations of panic I had studying the diagram, the merest skips in my heart, were right there under myocardial irritability: ‘UP^'”
“I was going to need a map,” the book begins, with Bradbury on the cusp of her fourth quarter, and changes in the mix. Her marriage has ended, she’s retired from a career in journalism, her children are grown, and yet none of this indicates the end of her story. And it seems there exists no instruction manual for finding one’s way forward at this pivotal time of life, a moment at which she’s finding new love, discovering a new vocation as a writer, and reconsidering the stories she told herself about her history. And so, unable to procure a map for the future, she finds one that takes her into the past instead, a map of the setting from her earliest memories, St. Catharines, Ontario, consulting her trusty siblings to make sense of where she came from, who she’s been.
This Way Up is a delightful, hilarious, and richly crafted story of getting one’s bearings when everything seems upside down. It’s a terrifically candid story of mothering adult children (Bradbury’s daughter’s constant refrain of “Oh my god, Mom…” made her one of my favourite characters in the book), of sustaining longtime friendship, the twists and turns (and pokes) of sibling relationships, and the physical and emotional realities of aging. It’s also beautifully bookish, full of literary allusions, and a wonderful nonfiction companion to Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By the Sea.
I loved this book, speeding through it in just two sittings. The structure and form are fascinating. On the surface, the reading is direct and straightforward, easy and breezy, but there are such depths, threads beautifully woven into the narrative, appearing and reappearing, so precise and impactful—nothing easy about it at all, except the way it’s such a gorgeous pleasure to read.
July 2, 2025
A Dark Death, by Alice Fitzpatrick
I was lucky to be born in Canada, and doubly lucky to also be able to also choose Canada when I moved (back) here with my immigrant spouse exactly 20 years and two days ago. My feelings about Canada Day and nationalism are always complicated (which I think they should be), and they’re additionally complicated this year with Canada’s sovereignty under threat. The world is so weird and interesting, and nations are made-up stories, but also so is everything.
This past long weekend (which stretched four days long) kicked off summer for us with a beautiful weekend camping in one of our favourite places on the shores of Lake Erie. And I was thrilled to delighting in a Canadian novel on the beach, Alice Fitzpatrick’s A DARK DEATH, the second book in her Meredith Island Mystery series (I haven’t read the first, jumped right into this one, and it was fine!). Meredith Island is a small and homey Welsh island where retired teacher Kate Galway (who solved her aunt’s murder the summer before) is hoping to finish her novel, but there is too much happening for that even before the first body turns up. A group of archaeology students is unearthing supposed evidence of a Roman temple, and a conman posing as a psychic is stirring up trouble among her neighbours, and then all hope of tranquility is lost when a body turns up amidst the dig site. Once again, the local constabulary is going to require Kate’s assistance, although they’re calling it meddling. And what about the minister who has locked herself inside the church and seems to have lost her faith? Or the shopkeeper who has fallen under suspicion for the murder, even though Kate knows that surely he hasn’t done it.
The narrative moves between multiple perspectives, Kate sharing the story with her neighbours, with the young police detective who is one of Kate’s former students, her artist friend who is looking to seduce the detective, the Professor leading the dig, his errant students, with the Minister, and her doctor husband. The result is a satisfying (and amusing) picture of a community with Three Pines vibes, each character with his or her own struggles and temptations, and a fun and absorbing mystery to follow, and this series might be joining my own personal list of must-reads.
It’s also one of 49thShelf’s July Summer Reading picks, if you feel like doing some Canadian reading yourself. And even better—each and every title on the list is up for giveaway!
June 26, 2025
In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, by James Cairns
I have trouble with understanding things, with understanding proportion. As someone with anxiety, I tend towards catastrophic thinking anyway, and so I get confused with how the media reports such things, how it all gets compounded. An example, say, like Covid, which came along with the most infectious variant ever, and then the one after that which was even more infectious, and then one that 20 times more infectious, and that was around the time my brain broke into bits, because how is that even possible?
What does it mean when everything everywhere is a crisis? James Cairns’ essay collection In Crisis, On Crisis is an effort to answer that question, and belongs to a genre of literature from which I’ve been finding answers this spring, and includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theories of Water and The Snag, by Tessa McWatt. There was a time, a little under a decade ago, when people who marching around holding signs that said, “I WANT YOU TO PANIC,” and let me tell you, I did what they said, but all I got was a mental breakdown. And so what I’m looking for these days are stories for how we can still live rich and meaningful lives in this moment, while envisioning possibilities for a different kind of future.
These essays by Cairns—a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and also a socialist—are a fascinating blending of personal, cultural, and scholarly, many of his broader ideas about living amidst crisis underlined by his experience as someone who lives with addiction, someone who has relapsed and recovered in the past, and could very well do so again: “The fact is, I’m not going to drink today. And if I relapse tomorrow or ten months from now, I have experience and supports to get me through it. It won’t necessarily mean my life is ruined. But it might. There is no curing, no transcending my alcoholism./ This is a crisis. This is not a crisis.”
How do we live knowing that bad things can happen? How do we live knowing that bad things will happen? In these essays—which delve into Trumpism, apocalyptic reading, whether we are in fact living through a crisis of democracy, midlife crises and Karl Ove Knausgaard, fatalism and Sylvia Plath, the experience of moving during a pandemic, if now is a “post-truth” moment, fears and anxieties about his children and their futures in the face of the climate crisis—Cairns delves deep into these questions and urges the reader to leave room for possibility.
June 20, 2025
Water Borne, by Dan Rubinstein
I became an admirer of Dan Rubinstein with his 2015 book BORN TO WALK: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF A PEDESTRIAN ACT, which I read not long after Rebeccca Solnit’s WANDERLUST, loving how the two books were complementary, and with his latest release, WATER BORNE, I am once again struck by how beautifully his work fits into a wider literary context, specifically books about water and rivers that have also come out this spring by Robert Macfarlane and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, both of whom would likely also have underlined the following lines from Rubinstein’s book, “…borders, like the fringes of any lake, river, or ocean, are transition zones. The rough margins where change comes slowly, from the friction of daily and seasonal cycles. Or in a tremendous burst, like water breaching a dam.”
WATER BORNE is the story of Rubinstein’s journey by stand-up paddleboard (SUP) from his home in Ottawa, Ontario, to Montreal on the Ottawa River; from Montreal to New York City via the Lake Champlain and the Hudson River; and Albany, NY, to Buffalo, via the Erie Canal; and then from St. Catharines to Kingston, via Lake Ontario; and back home to Ottawa on the Rideau Canal. It’s also the story of the strangers he met along the way, the friends and relations who supported him, odd conversations at campgrounds, a chronicle of lost sunglasses., and the history of these waterways, man-made, histories that tell of the rise and fall of different industries over centuries, a progress that led to the degradation of lakes and rivers and the health of creatures who make their lives by their waters.
But it’s also the story of people who are working to change this cycle, of projects to restore life to waterways, both in terms of the natural world and actually making these waterways accessible to the people who’d most benefit from this access, people who don’t have the luxury of vacation houses or even swimming lessons. Throughout the book, Rubinstein imparts the wonders of “blue spaces,” which are like green spaces, but even better for our mental health. Considering all of this as he paddles during a season where the temperature is breaking heat records and the air is thick with smoke from wildfires. What lessons can blue spaces teach us at a moment when the stakes are oh so high.
Rubinstein’s narrative is funny and engaging, and personal as he weaves his family’s story in among the broader history. (His mother, who tracks his locations, and sends worried texts, is one of the best characters in the book.) Nimbly, he blends memoir with reportage to make a story that flows beautifully, and is both hopeful and inspiring, and a must-read for those of us who love blue spaces already.
June 17, 2025
Mystery Books I’ve Loved This Spring
Widows and Orphans, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
There is no joy quite like the second instalment of a mystery series being EVEN BETTER THAN THE FIRST, especially when the writers are your friends and you get to tell them so. I loved Bury The Lead, the first book in the Quill & Packet series about journalist Cat Conway’s relocation to a small cottage community where she works at the local paper, and the next book finds her covering a wellness conference where the supplements include murder. I was expecting a fun mystery, and was delighted to find this underlined by a biting critique of conspiracy quackery which reads as all too timely.
(Listen to the authors talking about their first book on the first season of the BOOKSPO podcast!)
Detective Aunty, by Uzma Jalalludin
Imagine a Miss Marple-type detective, a sharp eyed older woman whose invisibility permits her all kinds of access, except she’s a Muslim-Canadian on a cusp of a brand new life after her husband’s death who is called on to help prove her daughter’s innocence when she’s accused of killing her shady landlord in Scarborough, Ontario. Can Kausar Kaur crack the case? Jalalludin is best known for her romance novels, but as she told me in our recent conversation on BOOKSPO, she was a mystery reader first and this is the detective novel she’s been hoping to write since the beginning of career as a novelist.
A Most Puzzling Murder, by Bianca Marais
The never-boring Marais returns with her fourth novel, a book unlike anything you’ve ever read before, except maybe the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels that absorbed your attention during childhood, because A Most Puzzling Murder is just as engaging, the story of Destiny, a brilliant young woman who is alone in the world and hoping to find family when she encounters the Scruffmore family on their strange and isolated island. But it turns out that the stakes are higher than she thought, and it’s up Destiny to solve a series of puzzles (which are the reader solves alongside her) to solve a murder and figure out the mystery of her past.
Who By Water, by Greg Rhyno
Another second-book-in-the-series that didn’t let me down, Greg Rhyno’s Who By Water marks the return of Dame Polara, reluctant PI, except she’s a single mother now, which means the stakes are oh-so-high when her ex-husband is killed and Dame has apparently been framed for his murder. The novel’s vivid Toronto setting and the complicated character of its protagonist are just two of the reasons to pick this up (listen to Rhyno on BOOKSPO talking about how he went about writing a female character whose depiction wouldn’t make woman readers throw the book at the wall), and the great mystery at its heart will keep you gripped.
The Cost of a Hostage, by Iona Whishaw
And oh, I look forward to Iona Whisaw’s Lane Winslow mysteries so very much, with their setting and people that feel like home to me. I already wrote about The Cost of a Hostage here! Once again, Whishaw brings her readers a story with fascinating moral complexity and a healthy dose of feminism and progressive values. And yes, just enough peril that you’ll be totally gripped.
The Last Exile, by Sam Wiebe
And from my “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf: My toxic trait is jumping right into mystery series midway through, a habit that horrifies some people, but I promise you that good writers design their books so it’s possible, and if I had to start at the beginning every time, I might never ever bother. But I’m so glad I did with Sam Wiebe’s Dave Wakeland series, and its latest installment, The Last Exiles, in which PI Wakeland returns to Vancouver to help prove the innocence of a rough-around-the-edges single mother accused of murdering a retired biker and his wife in their luxurious float home. It’s deftly plotted, absolutely gripping, and has real heart. (And yes, I will read the other books now!)
June 11, 2025
How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast
I saw myself in Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, specifically the part where she writes about how strangers project onto her their feelings about her novelist mother, a burden that she has born in good spirits, all things considered. When I published an essay about her mother’s iconic 1973 novel Fear of Flying way back when, I tagged Jong-Fast in a Twitter post, and I think she even shared it. Although in the years since, Jong-Fast has come to mean an awful lot to me as a person in her own right, in the last five years that I’ve been listening to her podcast, which continues to be a balm to my anxiety and has helped me make (some) sense of the chaos of our era, but then it turns out that making sense of chaos is something Molly Jong-Fast has been doing for a very long time.
And this novel is a document of that process, a memoir of her childhood born to famous artistic parents for whom “parenting” was not a verb, and of the neglect she experienced as her mother chased fame and ignored her addictions, and also a memoir of Jong-Fast’s very difficult year as her mother’s dementia advanced and Jong-Fast’s husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, among other heartbreaks and calamities. Sober since age 19, Jong-Fast has designed a very different life from her mother’s, marrying at 24 and finding joy as the parent to three children, and now as her mother begins to decline (and her stepfather is dying from Parkinson’s concurrently), Jong-Fast resents the time she’s forced to spent caring for parents whom she feels never cared for her.
I really appreciated this honest portrayal of the realities of eldercare, and Jong-Fast’s awareness of her limits, her refusal to be a martyr. I also love the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship she constructs, that it’s all love all the same, even with the failures of mother and daughter both at various points in the relationship. That love is a multitudinous thing, but also that person has the right to own their own soul, their own story, which was the point of Fear of Flying after all, a lesson that perhaps is just one of many gifts (along with the burdens) that Molly Jong-Fast inherited from her imperfect mother.
June 10, 2025
The World So Wide, by Zilla Jones
St. Georges, Grenada. October 1982. Celebrated Canadian opera singer Felicity Alexander has arrived in her mother-country to be part of a showcase of Grenadian talent put on by the Caribbean nation’s revolutionary government whose Marxist doctrine is seen as a threat by the US. Although Felicity’s own reasons for being there are personal—almost 20 years before she had been at university in London with the man who is now Prime Minister of Grenada, and with his deputy, who’d been Felicity’s lover. And soon after her arrival, a rival of the Prime Minister attempts a coup, Felicity being roped into the crew who is put under house arrest, and all the while rumours are swirling that the United States is about to invade.
Zilla Jones’ debut novel, The World So Wide, moves between the tense days under house arrest and Zilla’s experience growing up on Winnipeg, her immigrant mother reserved in her affecting but working hard to give her talented daughter the musical education she deserves, which leads to Felicity receiving a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London, UK. More than anything else, Felicity is intent on her career success, and has no compunction about pursuing it, or liberating herself from her religious mother’s expectations, and also having sex whenever she cares to, which is very subversive for a woman in the 1960s, and especially for a Black woman. Once she gets to England, Felicity also finds that her Blackness is under debate in the company of other students from Caribbean in a way it had never been in Canada, where she was always firmly othered. Never really belonging anywhere properly, she becomes more determined to create a singular place in the world for herself.
Felicity knows exactly who she is, and does not bend to convention, which expects her to submit to marriage and motherhood. As befits an opera singer, her emotions and desires in the novel are outsized, larger than life, which makes for compelling and dramatic reading, the only drawback that secondary characters can seem slight in comparison, their own emotions and desires flattened. The novel does a terrific job, however, of using her personal story to bring history (albeit fictionalized) to life, illuminating the fascinating story of Grenada’s revolutionary government, which deserves to be better known.
June 3, 2025
Consider Yourself Kissed, by Jessica Stanley
I periodically wonder if, had I’d lived through any other period from my thirties into my mid-forties, I might look less ravaged by time right now. If I might resemble that woman I was in photographs until around 2013, whose hair was dark brown, her skin unlined, decidedly youthful. And while I have absolutely no complaints about my grey hair and wrinkles (I like how I look and I’ve known too many women who would have given anything to win their grey hair and wrinkles, but didn’t get the chance), I do wonder if the last decade and a bit has been just a bit EXTRA in terms of things that might age one seemingly overnight.
And this is the period that Jessica Stanley documents in her novel Consider Yourself Kissed, the story of a marriage set right close to the eye of the storm—Coralie is a Australian expat who falls in love with divorced dad and political journalist Adam after she rescues his small daughter when she falls into a London pond, and dropped into his world Coralie finds herself BELONGING for perhaps the first time in her life, after a peripatetic childhood, ensconced in a life that is rich and full. But maybe too full? Is there such a thing?
Against a tumultuous decade in British politics (during which Adam’s star only rises), including Brexit and the nightmare of five different Tory Prime Ministers, capped off with a worldwide pandemic, we see Coralie trying to balance the demands of motherhood and marriage with her own career, and failing enough that she feels pretty bad about all of it, all the while neglecting the creative dreams she stuffed in a drawer when she met her husband who had ambition enough for both of them.
Consider Yourself Kissed (the title comes from how a character in Mary McCarthy’s THE GROUP signs letters to his girlfriend, a literary nod to perfunctory love) reminds me of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which is pretty much the highest praise a critic can offer to a comic novel bridging the political and domestic. It’s a that book that shows how women ARE that bridge, making the lives of seemingly important men possible, mapping out quotidian details while their husbands are charting epic tales and being celebrated, while these wives stay quiet in the background. Except that Coralie reaches a point where she just can’t do it anymore, which is the moment we find her at when the novel begins, and to explain how she got there, she has to go back to the beginning…
Charming, funny, touching, and so engaging it’s almost exhausting (because WHAT A TIME IT’S BEEN), Consider Yourself Kissed is a complicated love story, and absolutely a delight.
