If July is the season of plot-heavy “beach reads,” then January is my month for contemplative, multivolume explorations of space and time. In that department, there may be nothing better than Danish writer Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. A reimagining of the classic Groundhog Day dilemma, the story unfolds as a series of journal entries by an antiquarian books dealer who, for no particular reason whatsoever, finds herself repeating the 18th of November, over and…

