Last ones of the year –
On the Calculation of Volume II, by Solvej Balle: It would have been easy for this to feel repetitive, but instead it started to go in really interesting directions as it continued to explore the life of a woman trapped in (on?) the 18th of November. There were a few questions I’d had of the narrator in Volume I (eg “why doesn’t she do _______?” or “how come she hasn’t tried ______?”), and those were addressed and answered. I found myself wishing for a book club to discuss, and the volume ends on a perfect cliffhanger.
The Inherited Mind, by James Longman: This was a fine, but it didn’t have one or more of a) a truly unusual story; b) excellent science writing a la Carl Zimmer or Siddhartha Mukherjee; or c) incredible prose. The medical explanations of schizophrenia, in particular, felt very surface-level. Not a bad book, but I found myself more interested in Longman’s reporting experiences, which are only touched on.
Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka: Wow. Brutal and excellent. I can’t wait to read Kukafka’s first novel.
A Fatal Inheritance, by Lawrence Ingrassia: A journalist’s exploration of the p53 mutation, an inherited mutation that can cause cancers of all kinds to devastate multiple members of a family – including Ingrassia’s own, though he doesn’t carry the mutation himself. This struck a good balance between personal history and medical investigation.
