On the Calculation of Volume 1

I heard On the Calculation of Volume by Danish author Solvej Balle being discussed on the Radio National Book Shelf program, and because it has a timey-wimey plot, I was instantly intrigued. Main character Tara finds herself trapped in a time loop, where she wakes up day after day stuck inside the 18th November, just like Groundhog Day, except without the comic slant, and with the difference that she wakes wherever she fell asleep the night before, rather than returning always to the same starting point.

Tara is away from home in Paris when the pattern strikes; in a panic, she flees for home and explains her situation to her husband Thomas. But the day is not repeating for him; every 18th November happens for the first time. Again and again Tara has to explain her plight. They experiment together, try to stay awake all night, try to figure out why some things reset and others remain used up or transported. Eventually Tara separates from Thomas, withdrawing into their spare room and living a shadow, unseen life around his movements (he, of course, assumes that she is away in Paris). As Tara draws closer to a full year having passed for her, having experienced 18th November 365 times, she wonders if the loop will close -- or is there some significant action she must take to break the spell?

On the Calculation of Volume has to be the dullest title I've ever heard, especially for such a weird, haunting little book. Maybe it sounds better in Danish? And I can't have been listening properly to the Book Shelf, because I entirely missed the fact that this is just volume 1 of a projected seven book series!I absolutely flew through this novel, unsettled and delighted. Needless to say I have already reserved volume 2. 

Reading Round-up 2025

I read like an absolute fiend this last year -- 189 books in total. Books have always been my preferred escape method and I burrowed into them this last year for comfort and distraction. Perhaps it's no accident that I didn't do much writing! Or if I did, it didn't really lead anywhere -- yet. Fingers crossed for a more productive 2026 on that front.

Kids/YA v Adult

I read just over a third children's and young adult books, and about two thirds adult books. Last year I did less nostalgic mining of my bookshelves for old favourites, and made a conscious decision to read more new YA fiction, making my way through the Notables list of the CBCA awards, which led me to discover a lot of really good authors and books I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. I think I'll probably do the same again this year. One old favourite of the kids' books I did enjoy was Antonia Forest's The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels, the former of which I haven't read since high school -- it stood up very well!

Male v Female Authors

Quite a few more blokes in the mix in 2025! I discovered some new-to-me writers like Percival Everett and George Saunders, as well as James Rebanks and some YA Australian authors that, honestly, I might not have picked up if I wasn't reading my way through a list. A warning against my own prejudices.

 

Fiction v Non-Fiction

A little bit more fiction last year than the year before, I think, but still a pretty healthy proportion of non-fiction books.

 

Sources

 

Where would I be without my libraries? All the Notables YA books came from my local library, which bumped up that total. The secondhand category includes books from street libraries as well as bought from Brotherhood Books, secondhand books shops and op shop finds. I borrowed some books from friends and some from my daughters. New books is mostly gifts (some to myself!) I read far fewer books from my own shelves in 2025, and a lot of those were adult books: I revisited some high school favourites like The Leopard, A Month in the Country and I Heard the Owl Call My Name.

 

Author origin
 

Some significant changes from 2024 in this chart! I read fewer UK authors, and more American ones -- particularly surprising since I'm almost boycotting US culture at the moment in other fields. I also read a lot more Australian authors, thanks to the Notables challenge, plus a good proportion of First Nations authors. I also read one Irish book, three from New Zealand, two by Canadian authors, one Italian, and one with a mix of nationalities.

 

Highlights

I started a Helen Garner binge at the beginning of the year but didn't finish, thanks to the plethora of  other books jostling for my attention. But I will definitely reread more of her non-fiction this year. 

 

In fiction, I also binged on Curtis Sittenfeld, Barbara Pym and Eva Ibbotson, all delightful in very different ways. I'm loving the current crop of Regency/Austen era lady detective novels around at the moment -- more, please! Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall was a haunting miniature masterpiece.

 

In non-fiction, standouts for me were Kate Grenville's Unsettled and also Searching for the Secret River. I revelled in Ruth Park's autobiographies, Fishing in the Styx and A Fence Around the Cuckoo. John Higgs' history of Dr Who, Exterminate! Regenerate! was a deep pleasure to read.  Martin Flanagan's Question 7 took my breath away.

 

 

Searching for the Secret River

Having read Kate Grenville's brilliant Unsettled not long ago, it seemed like fate when Searching for the Secret River popped up on Brotherhood Books. It made a very interesting companion read, because it covers some of the same ground, but from quite a different angle. As a writer, it was fascinating to follow Grenville through the process of writing this big, important, successful novel, from the first scratch of interest in her family history and the stories handed down, all the way to the final edit, and the multitude of decisions along the way. In Unsettled, the emphasis is squarely on her awareness and assumptions about First Peoples, and interrogating the family stories with fresh knowledge. One of the very first prompts for rethinking came early on, when a First Nations writer helped Grenville to query what 'taking up land' really meant -- it meant 'taking.'

This is a story Grenville also tells in Unsettled; it was clearly a formative moment. Despite its wide success, The Secret River was not an uncontroversial novel. It was criticised for not including the voices of its Aboriginal characters; Grenville reveals that was a deliberate, and in its own way, respectful choice. Inga Clendinnen fiercely argued that Grenville confused history and fiction; I'm not sure that's true. The project of fiction is not the same as the project of history, and Grenville is aware of that all the way through.

I'm so glad I read this book, though it might not be as totally fascinating for everyone. It got me through a long night in the emergency department of our local hospital, if nothing else!
 

Unsettled

Kate Grenville's non-fiction meditation, Unsettled, is one of the best books I've read this year. Grenville is well-known for her novels based on her family's history: The Secret River, Sarah Thornhill, Restless Dolly Maunder. She's also written Searching for the Secret River, which is an account of the research process she went through while writing the first of those novels. Unsettled is a different kind of journey, though she often refers to that research and ancestral history. But this time, she's looking at the bigger picture -- not just the individuals of her family and the choices they made, but how those choices fitted into a broader colonial narrative.

Grenville takes a simple but effective structure, retracing various ancestors' movements, from that first settlement on the Hawkesbury, further and further out from Sydney, finishing with the farm where her own mother was brought up. Along the way, she reflects on the way 'settlement,' or more bluntly, stealing land from First Nations people, must have felt for both the colonists and the dispossessed. She brilliantly examines the way our language serves to obscure the reality of what happened -- how we speak of settlers 'taking up land', when we really mean 'taking land.' Squatters 'got' land, women 'were never left without a gun.' What horrors are those bland words hiding?

There are plenty of challenging ideas here, but Grenville leads us through the landscape and her own thoughts gently but firmly, never allowing us to turn away completely, while acknowledging the strong urge to hide from the truth that has gripped our nation from its beginnings. She ends on a hopeful note, visiting the memorial to the Myall Creek massacre, the only occasion when white men were hanged for the murder of Aboriginal people -- a memorial that was constructed after local inhabitants, Black and white, sat down together to commemorate their shared, painful history.

Unsettled would be a perfect book to give to someone just learning about Australian history, or someone who grew up when we weren't taught the truth. It is confronting, but it's not sanctimonious or preachy, and it's engagingly easy to read; we travel beside Grenville as she works through her own feelings and thoughts. Yes, it's written from a white person's point of view, but as a first hand struggle with accepting and sitting with our shameful past, it's intimate, valuable and powerful.
 

Nella Last's Peace

I've been slowly making my way through two books simultaneously: Roger Deakin's Wildwood (of which more presently) and Nella Last's Peace. The latter is an edited volume of some of the millions of words of diaries kept by Nella Last, a middle-aged, 'ordinary' housewife, as part of Britain's Mass Observation project. She kept the detailed diaries faithfully all through the war, and almost up until her death in 1968, and this book covers the first couple of years of peacetime.

Despite the longed-for peace and victory finally arriving, times were not easy, and in some ways harder to bear than the war itself, when a spirit of community and selflessness swept up many ordinary citizens in sacrifice to a larger cause. Nella finds herself wistful for those times and her own voluntary work in the Forces Canteen, and the friends she made there. The reader senses her frustration, with the continued shortages and hardships, with her withdrawn husband, with her unsettled younger son (who emigrated to Australia and became a celebrated sculptor, Clifford Last), and with her difficult in-laws.

Perhaps this is just about what's going on my own life at the moment, but to me the most moving parts of the diary deal with the struggles of Nella's young friend and neighbour, Jessie, who falls ill with what sounds like postpartum psychosis, and is hospitalised for a time. Nella's husband seems to suffer from an anxiety disorder; her mother-in-law has dementia, and Nella herself is sometimes struck by gastric attacks that seem to be anxiety related. It was quite frightening to realise how little information and treatment and even recognition was available for mental illness, and how terrifying it would have been to be faced with mental illness in the family. Happily, Jessie made a complete recovery.

Long Ago When I Was Young

I stumbled across this short memoir, Long Ago When I Was Young, by one of my favourite childhood authors, E. Nesbit, while browsing on Brotherhood Books. I'd never heard of this book's existence, so I had to act quickly to grab it while it was still there -- didn't I?

E. Nesbit's magical (and non-magical) novels were a staple of my youthful reading. The Phoenix and the Carpet, Five Children and It, The Wouldbegoods and The Treasure Seekers, and of course The Railway Children, were borrowed and re-borrowed. I tried reading them to my children but the stories were too slow, too Victorian, and they didn't 'take', which made me so sad, as Edith Nesbit is the godmother of modern urban fantasy. Edward Eager acknowledged his debt to her in every one of his own delightful books, and I believe she invented the genre of 'magic in the real world', or at the very least popularised it.

This slim volume, beautifully illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, collects some of Nesbit's most vivid childhood memories of growing up in the 1860s. She had an unsettled youth, moved from one boarding school to another as her mother shifted around the country with young Edith's (Daisy) ill elder sister. The family also spent time travelling around France and Germany, before finding a more permanent home in the Kentish countryside. The most poignant chapters tell of the things that frightened Daisy -- ghosts, the dark space behind the bed, the gas turned low to make creepy shadows, and especially the terrifying mummies in a crypt that she was taken to see, and which gave her nightmares for many years. What a great idea, to take a sensitive child to see some half-preserved corpses in a cave!

This book has reminded me how much I loved Nesbit's books. Time for a revisit, perhaps.

When One Book Leads To Another

Lucy Lethbridge's Servants was every bit as fascinating and readable as I'd hoped, packed with insight and intriguing historical titbits. I'd always vaguely assumed that the advent of labour-saving technology (vacuum cleaners, washing machines) had made servants redundant, but no, it was the other way round. It wasn't until after the Second World War, when the experience of working independently made most working-class women rebel against the notion of being 'in service' with all its petty humiliations, that the shortage of domestic labour made desperate middle class women turn to the machines.

It was intriguing to discover that as early as the 1890s, there were mutterings about the 'servant problem.' Why were poor girls so reluctant to go into domestic service, where they'd be housed and fed, often in much better conditions than if they stayed at home or in a scungy rented room and worked in a factory? This baffling conundrum led to several undercover reports, with middle class female journalists posing as servants to find out what life was really like below stairs. They seemed astonished to discover how demanding was the sheer physical labour required, not to mention the long hours, the lack of privacy, and the countless reminders of your own supposed inferiority. One maid reported that her employers seemed nonplussed and oddly unsettled at the idea of her reading serious books, rather than trashy romances or lowbrow magazines.

One of the sources for Servants was Monica Dickens' One Pair of Hands (1939), which I looked up on the Kindle and was delighted to be able to purchase instantly. I vaguely remembered reading Dickens' One Pair of Feet at high school, which dealt with her time in nursing, but I'd never read the first volume. It's a hoot. Monica Dickens (grand-daughter of Charles) was an unconventional school girl and was expelled (apparently) for throwing her uniform off a bridge. Instead of following the normal upper-class career path of debutant, wedding, unhappy housewife, she decided to work as a cook-general, thereby "giving many of her employers the rather uncomfortable experience of employing someone who was further up the social scale than they were" as her biography puts it. One Pair of Hands is her account of her experiences, good and bad.

Of course, it's a very different experience working in service when you don't really have to, and Dickens several times simply runs away from situations that have become awkward or unpleasant, but her memoir is so lively and funny, and Dickens herself seems so irrepressible, that you can't help wishing that you were friends with her. She is cheerfully self-deprecating about her disasters and inadequacies as a cook and cleaner, and unashamedly fascinated by the personal lives of her employers, never letting on that when they speak French or German to keep secrets from her, she can speak far more fluently than they can...

I'm enjoying One Pair of Hands so much I might have to revisit One Pair of Feet as well, and I don't think I've ever read My Turn To Make The Tea, which is Monica Does Journalism... Oh, dear, this is where instant gratification can lead you...

Between Books

I don't have anything to write at the moment.

It feels weird. I hadn't planned to do much this year, because I knew that Evie being at kinder would chop up my days and not give me much opportunity for working. I'd vaguely supposed that I might be spending this time editing and rewriting Crow Country, but it hasn't come back to me yet. There was also the delightful frenzy of Swoosie, which definitely wasn't planned. And yet now I find myself strangely idle.

I am mulling over and researching the New Guinea book, but I'm nowhere near ready to start actually writing it. (The characters are quite clear, but I don't know what's going to happen to them yet.) And there is the very faint stirring of a new fantasy at the back of my mind, which isn't even an idea yet. And it's just as well I don't have anything pressing, because there have been school holidays and sick kids, and maybe building work soon, and it would be awful to have a deadline and no chance to work.

But then I remember that it was in one of these peculiar, unsettled phases that I began to write Singer of All Songs, just for something to do. And I guess that worked out okay.

(I found an online review today that described Singer as "under-rated." Oh, well, better than being over-rated, I suppose!)