📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• The nice thing about dystopian fiction is that it almost never comes true.

  an excerpt from Identity, written by Francis Fukuyama in 2018

• The carvings on the cliff at Naksh-i-Rustam range over twenty centuries, from Elamite to Achemenian to Sasanian. Below them stand two fire-altars of uncertain date and an Achemenian tomb-house. Only the last is beautiful. The rest are negative art or repel-lent. But while the mountains last, the rock-maniacs who commanded these things must be remembered - and they knew it. They were indifferent to the gratitude of posterity. No perishable aestheticism or legal benevolence for them! All they ask is attention, and they get it, like a child or Hitler, by brute insistence.

  an excerpt from The Road to Oxiana, written by Robert Byron in 1933

• Isfahan, I3 February - There is a lot of missionary effort here, of the muscular, wicked-to-smoke-or-drink type. Men in spectacles, tweed coats, and flannel trousers go striding down the Char Bagh accompanied by small boys and bearing the unmistakable imprint of the British schoolmaster; their behinds stick out as if their spines were too righteous to bend. Behind it all lurks an Anglican bishop, who has lately become an apostle of the Oxford Group Movement. Buchmanism in Isfahan! This is a cruel revenge for the Bahais in Chicago.

  an excerpt from The Road to Oxiana, written by Robert Byron in 1933

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• Also, how good is this title for a seven-book series? On the Calculation of Volume I.

  an note about On the Calculation of Volume, written by Solvej Balle in 2024

• I LOVED the creepy idea that the time-looped person has some small effect in the world. The day resets... but the food you ate from the grocery store is gone. Now there's no more of that orange-flavored chocolate you like. There's one fewer leek in the garden. You are slowly eating up the world! This is quietly horrific, like you are one of the Stephen King Langoliers and you might eventually consume... everything?

  an note about On the Calculation of Volume, written by Solvej Balle in 2024

• A lovely, literary scifi time loop story (which, incidentally, sparked this idea about a Groundhog Day Codeword. Our heroine just... wakes up in the same day, every day. It's befuddling but not scary. Mysterious but not confusing. She goes about tackling this problem with good grace, and it's a really lovely read. Even if your partner believed you - how many times could you explain your situation, over and over again? Eventually wouldn't it be easier to... not?

  an note about On the Calculation of Volume, written by Solvej Balle in 2024

Looking for more recent books? Check out the Personal Timeline.