2026.11.05

book review: On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle

or really the 5 books (of 6 and planned 7) currently in en

a manga plot translated for 50-something euro women. read these over the course of two days and got little out of them. to make something more worth reading, a good start would be collapsing into a single book of 300 pages or so, rather than >900

books suffer from an author who's pretentious without being clever, apparently spending so much time writing empty fluff that she's never bothered to read anything. her main character as well spends three years in a frozen world mostly laying about before deciding to read a book (about the roman empire, of all things). and, when the series progresses to introducing new characters from different jobs and backgrounds, they are all popular media caricatures drawn without detail or field expertise (e.g. a programmer who's never heard of OCR

think i'll leave it here and rely on a few sentence summary for closure, whenever part 7 is released

or more likely forget entirely and read something more interesting