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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by
Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics is an unforgettable debut novel that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock: a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit.
'I wrote this account one year after I'd found Hannah Dead.
I thought I'd managed to era ...more
'I wrote this account one year after I'd found Hannah Dead.
I thought I'd managed to era ...more
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Paperback, 514 pages
Published
May 3rd 2007
by Penguin
(first published August 3rd 2006)
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Amanda Claiborne
A multiple choice test that asks you to weigh in on whether you believe what Blue believes she has discovered.
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Start your review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Aug 28, 2007
Patrick
rated it
it was ok
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
easily impressed high school students
Reviews of “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” and the Bottle of Açaí Juice I Bought for Lunch Cleverly Masked as SAT Test Questions
Choices:
(a) Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(b) The bottle of açaí juice I bought for lunch
(c) Both a and b
(d) Neither a nor b
Questions
(1) __ I had heard good things about it
(2) __ I bought it on a whim
(3) __ If feeling extremely charitable, I might call it “frothy”
(4) __ It seemed sort of good in the beginning, but by the end I was like, “Blaahahhgajh. End, end, ...more
Choices:
(a) Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(b) The bottle of açaí juice I bought for lunch
(c) Both a and b
(d) Neither a nor b
Questions
(1) __ I had heard good things about it
(2) __ I bought it on a whim
(3) __ If feeling extremely charitable, I might call it “frothy”
(4) __ It seemed sort of good in the beginning, but by the end I was like, “Blaahahhgajh. End, end, ...more

There’s a special cold black place in my heart for writers under thirty who come out of nowhere with a best-selling much-praised first novel for which they receive huge advances and instant fame. The feeling is called jealousy - deep, shoulda-been-me jealousy that clouds my ability to judge the book itself.
Which brings us to Marisha Pessl and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Every big review I read of it was glowing and every writer under thirty I talked to said it was a piece of steaming shi ...more
Which brings us to Marisha Pessl and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Every big review I read of it was glowing and every writer under thirty I talked to said it was a piece of steaming shi ...more

Donna Tartt wrote a splendid book called The Secret History which both celebrated and skewered hyper-intellectualism as well as explored the process of interacting with a text and the pleasures of narrative devices. This book follows roughly the same storyline (and, incidentally, the storyline of Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight, down to the "study questions" at the end), except there's absolutely no reason for the precious chapter titles and the annotated references - they have no bearing on th
...more

I've read other reviews and I believe the negative reviews have been written by people who didn't take time to really read the book and follow it all the way through. It would be easy to do. It's not a book you can speed read. (See Ulysses by James Joyce) Sometimes I'll tear through a good book in a couple of days. But there is so much in this book that you have to take your time to really comprehend it and get the good stuff out of it. Marisha's writing technique is totally unique with her hund
...more

I really wanted to like this book.
But it’s a train wreck. The literary carnage is so grotesque and horrifying, you can’t help but look, read. (And I promise you, just take my word for it, that metaphor is better than most that Pessl uses in this debut novel of hers.)
Despite what Bayard says, it’s amazing what happens when you stop talking about a text and actually interact with it. I’ll tell you what happens: disappointment. Utter, utter disappointment.
For all intents and purposes, the book does ...more
But it’s a train wreck. The literary carnage is so grotesque and horrifying, you can’t help but look, read. (And I promise you, just take my word for it, that metaphor is better than most that Pessl uses in this debut novel of hers.)
Despite what Bayard says, it’s amazing what happens when you stop talking about a text and actually interact with it. I’ll tell you what happens: disappointment. Utter, utter disappointment.
For all intents and purposes, the book does ...more

I tried with this book. I gave it 150 pages, and at this moment in time I just can't get into it. The constant literary allusions and pop culture references, mixed with the didactic and wordy writing style kept pushing me out of the story. I'd skim whole paragraphs just to find the important, plot-moving parts of the sentences. I held out hope for this one because I chose it for book club (sorry, friends!) and it's been on my shelf for 2+ years, so I felt like I had to conquer it. But it's only
...more

This is a story told through books themselves, a whodunnit, a coming-of-ager. Some will find this book too gimmicky...the use of a syllabus outline, the visual aids, the fact that the first word of the book is dad and the last word is me (thus encapsulating the entire story arch), the final exam. But this book made me feel the way I did during a college lecture on Lolita, where the professor broke down Lolita by numbers, the numbers of the license plates, the hotel room numbers, etc. They all sw
...more

Let me start by saying that I did like this book. I did. Ms. Pessl is probably too smart for her own good, but that's never stopped me before.
That said, as with most over-intelectualized writings, I had trouble getting close to her, to her work. There's such a lot of time spent obfuscating, demonstrating how clever she is, developing stacked metaphors and allusions, that the story is difficult to get lost in. You are constantly reminded that you are reading a novel by a very smart young lady. A ...more
That said, as with most over-intelectualized writings, I had trouble getting close to her, to her work. There's such a lot of time spent obfuscating, demonstrating how clever she is, developing stacked metaphors and allusions, that the story is difficult to get lost in. You are constantly reminded that you are reading a novel by a very smart young lady. A ...more

Jul 19, 2008
Erica
rated it
did not like it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
No one. Ever.
Shelves:
fiction
What have I learned? I've learned that apparently it's possible for a large number of fawning reviewers to confuse "pretentious" with "intelligent". I very likely got what I deserved when I chose to ignore a clear warning, namely the so called "Glossary of Terms" inside the dustjacket which introduced our 16 year old heroine, Blue van Meer, as "a brainy, deadpan, preternaturally erudite girl who...has a head crammed full of literary, scientific, and philosophical knowledge." Admittedly, I was ta
...more

I was about one-quarter of the way through this book when I had a strange revelation. It was, basically, kind of formulaic. And yet, the formula was rare and unpredictable. See, several years ago, I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a dark book about a group of preciously sophisticated, murderous wacked-out Classics majors at a small liberal arts college. I was captivated. Six months ago I read Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket's) The Basic Eight, about a group of precociously sophisticate
...more

This first bit is my initial reaction to the book. I'm keeping it up because I still think it's valid. However, see bellow for my post-reading thoughts.
Oh, how I hate this book. The parenthetic statements are making me homicidal. The dad is a jackass of unparalleled proportion, and I have yet to see Hannah do ANYTHING that warrants Blue's fascination. Sure, she picks up strange men in diners, but really, who hasn't? The writing is way too fond of its own wit, and I'm sick of all the figurative ...more
Oh, how I hate this book. The parenthetic statements are making me homicidal. The dad is a jackass of unparalleled proportion, and I have yet to see Hannah do ANYTHING that warrants Blue's fascination. Sure, she picks up strange men in diners, but really, who hasn't? The writing is way too fond of its own wit, and I'm sick of all the figurative ...more

(Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)
Okay, I'll admit it -- that whenever I hear of another young, good-looking first-time author in New York getting an obscenely high advance on their first book and suddenly becoming The Talk Of The Town, I automatically become suspicious, as sure a response from me as Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of their little bell. And that's because I've been around various people in the New York litera ...more
Okay, I'll admit it -- that whenever I hear of another young, good-looking first-time author in New York getting an obscenely high advance on their first book and suddenly becoming The Talk Of The Town, I automatically become suspicious, as sure a response from me as Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of their little bell. And that's because I've been around various people in the New York litera ...more

Jun 04, 2008
Nick Black
rated it
did not like it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
eight year old girls
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.

If the whimsy of "Bonjour Tristesse" met & mated with all that malignant student magic from "The Secret History" this would be their child. This Gen-Nexter novel holds the pulse of the zeitgeist under its overachieving, overintelligent finger and lets it be known: this is the novel for our generation, for the eager me!me!&onlyme!s. The heroine is such a brat, the reader oftens remembers past characters like these: uberegotist humanoids--selfish to the extreme, & SMILES--here is their side of the
...more

This one is going back on the pile. I made it over 100 pages this time. That's something, right?
My problems with this book are the glacial pace and overwritten sentences. It's like an even more wordy Donna Tartt book. I don't need literary references cited in every paragraph and overblown dialogue and flowery language for the sake of flowery language don't impress me at this stage in the game. The pretentious, pompous tone of the book is also a turn-off. Picking up the book to read it began feel ...more
My problems with this book are the glacial pace and overwritten sentences. It's like an even more wordy Donna Tartt book. I don't need literary references cited in every paragraph and overblown dialogue and flowery language for the sake of flowery language don't impress me at this stage in the game. The pretentious, pompous tone of the book is also a turn-off. Picking up the book to read it began feel ...more

Nov 10, 2016
Edward Lorn
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Fans of literary fiction.
Let's get my one and only complaint about the book out of the way.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is hard to get into. I started it numerous times it, but it kept losing my attention. Then my good friend Thomas Stromquist mentioned it was on his TBR, so we gave it the old buddy-read try and I finally got past the first 50 pages. It wasn't until Blue met Hannah that the story grabbed me. That is not to say that the opening pages are unneeded. The exact opposite is true. Everything here comes ...more
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is hard to get into. I started it numerous times it, but it kept losing my attention. Then my good friend Thomas Stromquist mentioned it was on his TBR, so we gave it the old buddy-read try and I finally got past the first 50 pages. It wasn't until Blue met Hannah that the story grabbed me. That is not to say that the opening pages are unneeded. The exact opposite is true. Everything here comes ...more

I could easily attend a semester-long seminar about this book. Holy "coming of age with murder, suicide, conspiracy theories, and turns you don't see coming because you aren't worthy to walk in the same light as Marisha Pessl" shit, this book was great. Better than Night Film. Bravo.
...more

A Frankenstein's monster of fast and furious factoids. A homemade goulash of parlor romance, teen coming of age, and Agatha Christie. Think Jeopardy! meets Degrassi High. Think Gilmore Girls meets Trivial Pursuit. Think some other low culture thing meets some sort of high culture thing, but whatever you're thinking, think fast.
Our narrator is a girl named Blue, and if you want to assign some symbolic meaning to that, go ahead - consider it the Lit Crit equivalent of a BINGO free space. She has a ...more
Our narrator is a girl named Blue, and if you want to assign some symbolic meaning to that, go ahead - consider it the Lit Crit equivalent of a BINGO free space. She has a ...more

Mar 18, 2018
Andrew Smith
rated it
did not like it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
not-finished
I only got about 20% of the way through this one. But do keep in mind that it’s a big book: over 500 pages or 21 hours of listening. I don’t like giving up on books and I’d really enjoyed her 2014 novel Night Film so I did try to stay with it. The problem is that though there’s a relatively enticing story here the telling is just so protracted, so tiresome that I lost the will.
It kicks off by introducing 24-year-old Blue van Meer who’d lost her mother early (car accident) and is now touring Am ...more
It kicks off by introducing 24-year-old Blue van Meer who’d lost her mother early (car accident) and is now touring Am ...more

Struck by a severe attack of the cutes, an over-worked bag of metaphors, and flimsy characterization. The dialogue is unnatural and in most cases unfitting for the characters (Dee and Dum's conversations in particular strike me as unreal for high schoolers). Most of these things are stylistic and, while annoying to read, can be groomed out with some forethought and good editing. The book, as has been acknowledged by other people, could easily be a hundred pages shorter than it is.
Blue I found s ...more
Blue I found s ...more

May 06, 2007
Anne
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone who once loved The Secret History, spawn of academics, over-readers
Special Topics... has certainly stirred the passions of readers and critics...especially those who love-to-hate first novels by young, successful authors. At the sight of Marisha Pessl's author photo -- lovely, unsmiling introspective waif -- I had to hold down my hate reflex with both arms, both legs, and my forehead. Yet twenty pages later, any evidence of hate (or even a struggle) was gone. I was captivated.
Blue Van Meer lost her mother at a very young age and now hops around the country wit ...more
Blue Van Meer lost her mother at a very young age and now hops around the country wit ...more

***NO SPOILERS***
What Special Topics in Calamity Physics is: a book about a sixteen-year-old girl and her dad living in a new town. What it isn’t: a book about physics. What it is: a book about a sixteen-year-old girl, her five uber-cool new friends, and one doting teacher. What it isn’t: all that it appears to be. Really, the story is indefinable. At its heart it’s a murder mystery, but to say that is also rudely dismissive--of its thoughtfulness, its quirkiness, its complexity. Special Topics ...more
What Special Topics in Calamity Physics is: a book about a sixteen-year-old girl and her dad living in a new town. What it isn’t: a book about physics. What it is: a book about a sixteen-year-old girl, her five uber-cool new friends, and one doting teacher. What it isn’t: all that it appears to be. Really, the story is indefinable. At its heart it’s a murder mystery, but to say that is also rudely dismissive--of its thoughtfulness, its quirkiness, its complexity. Special Topics ...more

Brilliant rendition of an unforgettable brainy teen who feels compelled to leave her world of books to solve the mystery of a teacher’s death. Many will find the book too long with not enough meaningful human action, but I found the world of the lead character’s mind grew on me as a doomed, but attractive, refuge from the narcissistic void facing many youth today.
Sixteen year old Blue van Meer moves to a small town in North Carolina with her political science professor dad and recounts her seni ...more
Sixteen year old Blue van Meer moves to a small town in North Carolina with her political science professor dad and recounts her seni ...more

I liked this book a lot. Ms. Pessl has a very unique voice. I suspect she is much like the central character Blue, erudite and very well read. Based on this novel and her second Night Film, I think she would be a fascinating dinner companion. Her writing style is however not for everyone. Throughout Topics Blue expresses herself using footnoted metaphors referencing obscure texts. I found this style to be interesting, entertaining and a good fit for Blue's character, but over time it does wear,
...more

This was a weird case of having high expectations and having no expectations, and being disappointed in one and reasonably well satisfied in the other. Overall, though, I didn't like it, and found it to be pretty obnoxious.
The best way to introduce this one is to use the blurb off the back:
The best way to introduce this one is to use the blurb off the back:
Calamity Physics: The resulting explosion of energy, light, heartbreak and wonder as Blue van Meer enters a small, elite school in a sleepy mountain town. Blue's highly unusual past draws her to a charismati...more

Jan 28, 2012
David Katzman
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Fans of Gossip Girl and MENSA club meetings
Special Topics in Mixed Feelings. Report from the Gifted & Talented program: there was much brilliance on display in the novel in question. My report from detention: some qualities of it irritated the hell out of me and one glaring structural element weakened it.
The premise: A genius high schooler is being dragged by her widowed, genius college-professor father from small college town to small college town and transferring from school to school. Said genius high schooler (one Blue van Meer) land ...more
The premise: A genius high schooler is being dragged by her widowed, genius college-professor father from small college town to small college town and transferring from school to school. Said genius high schooler (one Blue van Meer) land ...more

My initial interest in this book was mainly down to the fact that I had read numerous reviews comparing it to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my favourite novels of all time. Having finished it, I can now say with confidence that these comparisons are fairly inaccurate and really quite lazy. The obvious similarity between the books is that both concern an elite group of young people in an academic setting (in this case, a much-admired clique known as the 'Bluebloods' in an American high
...more

This may be the best book I've read all year, which isn't to say it's perfect. In fact, there are about a million reasons to hate it that most of my fellow reviewers have already touched upon: the gorgeous young It Girl-looking author for one, or the denseness of the writing (some have called it overwritten), the pretentiousness of it all. And yet, for sheer impact, I don't think I could come up with a single thing to top it. This book really gets in your head and doesn't leave it the same again
...more

Sep 10, 2007
Rory
rated it
did not like it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
apparently, anyone who isn't me
Shelves:
gave-up-on
i didn't really read this. i read about 30 pages before announcing (to the book's cover), "I HATE YOU, BOOK. SHUT UP!" anyone who wants more details as to why i despise the book that everyone else is raving about might need to buy me a drink first.
...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
so who did it? | 40 | 1334 | Mar 07, 2020 07:16AM | |
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Fiction - student murder/death - includes bibliography in its format. [s] | 4 | 34 | Dec 16, 2018 04:06AM | |
Play Book Tag: Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl 4/5 | 1 | 22 | Jun 29, 2018 07:52PM | |
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. YA about a high school girl named Blue going to a new school for senior year. [s] | 5 | 60 | May 20, 2018 10:13AM |
Marisha Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her debut novel, was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. It won the 2006 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Her
...more
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