Rent Joan Didion's House
Do not stay at Tuba Club!
I clicked through on quite a few “what I read this year” posts. Even though I am turned off by the goody two shoes nature of accounting. Who are these lists for, if not for us, and isn’t that depressing? I don’t keep a list of what I’ve read and I assume if I can’t remember something it wasn’t worth reading. So why do I click? I’m looking to disagree, I suppose, starting with the Paris Review letting its interns use words like “inimitable.”
This recommendation caught my eye in the Part Two of the Paris Review series (because I’m a gluten, I read both posts):
Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), is stuck on the day of November 18, which she repeats endlessly. Trapped in time, she makes an official project of it. Looking becomes ritualistic. The day’s relentless sameness is double-checked, until she can predict the movement of birds. Wonderfully, this is the first book in a series of seven.
I was sort of taken with this suggestion, until I realized that it was from K Patrik. She’s one of these English writers who only uses sentence fragments. (That country is going under.) I threw her much-celebrated book Mrs S in the trash can after one hundred pages. So I closed the tab. Then I was reading Catherine Lacey’s Substack, and she made the same recommendation and at length in a post called “A Reading Emergency.” (The emergency was she needed On the Calculation of Volume book 2, because she had finished book 1 and loved it.)
I could feel myself wanting to read this book, even though the premise of the book is boredom itself: a rare book dealer wakes up to the same day over and over, like Groundhog Day, a very annoying film, or Palm Springs, a slightly less annoying film to me (somehow!). Because Slovej Balle is from Scandinavia, she’s chosen to write seven volumes about this woman’s predicament. (And didn’t Foster Wallace die writing his book on boredom?) I walked into Dalkey to the only bookstore near me and tried to find a copy of book 1. They didn’t have it. I walked home and ordered it on Kindle on my iPhone. (The way books should be read.)
Catherine writes that it isn’t about the plot, “the real action is always in the language and the undertows that the text creates as a whole.” I too hate plot, especially at the expense of sentences. And so, I’m here to report that the book is very beautiful, very moving, one of those polishing stones books (you must slow down).
Here’s two pages so you can read for yourself.
If you are going to read a “my year in reading” piece, I liked Sophie Haigney’s the best. (Funnily enough, a Paris Review editor! Though she made this post on her website.) I’ll also include some of Madeleine Watts’s favorite books from the year. By her accounting, she “finished” 143 books in 2024. She’s an ex-bookseller, and I met her because I adored her recommendations (handwritten at Mcnally Jackson), so she’s allowed to do what she wants:
Rent Joan Didion’s House
I’m feeling bullish on American tourism. Living part-time in Europe will do this to you.
A great dream of mine is renting a pickup truck in Miami, and using my dogeared copy of Joy Williams’s guidebook The Florida Keys. (I’ve read it a few times, but I’ve never been.) A friend of mine says it holds up, mostly because things in the Keys don’t change so much.
I have this idea of going to Michigan, renting a car, and staying in every house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. There’s a remarkable number operating as Airbnb’s and VRBOs.
