An end of week recap
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
– Oscar Wilde (Born 16th October 1854)
Thank you so much for all your kind and thoughtful messages welcoming me back to the book blogging fold. Though I still haven’t replied to everyone, I was immensely touched by your comments and promise to respond to all of you as soon as possible.
As ever, this is a weekly post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.
CHATTERBOOKS >>
If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.
* A Riot of Reading Events *
We are heading towards the busiest period in the book bloggers calendar – a spell culminating in a maelstrom of literary goings-on, which I have come to know as Nonstop November. I therefore highlight a miniscule assortment of forthcoming biblio-happenings for your consideration:
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with you one of my favourite literary posts from around the blogosphere. There are so many talented writers posting high-quality book features and reviews, it is difficult to pick only this one – which was published over the last week or so:
* Irresistible Items *
Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting my favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, here are a selection of interesting snippets:
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The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction:The Baillie Gifford Prize 2022 shortlist announced – The shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing, was announced live from Cheltenham Literature Festival on 10th October.
Big Think: 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books – Scotty Hendricks aims to convince readers these hard-to-finish books are still worth the effort.
The Guardian: ‘Hope matters’: Ukrainian and international authors on why literature is important in times of conflict – “Ten writers appearing at the Lviv BookForum, run this year in partnership with the Hay festival, discuss why we need books more than ever.”
Astra: Feels Like Fate – Emma Garman explores what it means when a novelist’s fiction later becomes reality. Is it manifestation or premonition, she wonders?
BBC Leicester: Leicester Adrian Mole show celebrates book’s 40th birthday – “A university is planning to stage an exhibition and a series of events to celebrate the 40th anniversary of 1980s bestseller The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾, says Jennifer Harby.
CBC: The finalists for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction – “The $25,000 prizes recognize the best Canadian books of the year.”
Words Without Borders: A New Translation Prize: The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation – “Jury chair Jason Grunebaum and Armory Square partner and co-founder Pia Sawhney talk with WWB about the new Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation.”
Nation Cymru: On Being a Writer in Wales: Jane Fraser – For Jane Fraser, author of Advent, “being a writer in Wales is a multi-faceted experience: positive in the main, but not without its challenges.”
The Quietus: Haunted Resonance: An Interview With Alan Moore – “The wizard of Northampton talks magic, Englishness, and his new book of short stories Illuminations” with Miles Ellingham.
Deadline: Raw Truth Entertainment Developing Kalani Pickhart Novel ‘I Will Die In A Foreign Land’, On Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests Of 2013, As First Feature – Matt Grobar reveals that Kalani Pickhart’s novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land is to be adapted to film.
LA Times: Two podcasters set out to read every Agatha Christie book. It became much more than that – “For six years, thousands of Agatha Christie enthusiasts across the globe have downloaded the podcast for what one listener described as a ‘joyfully geeky’ take on the Queen of Crime’s expansive canon,” says Deborah Netburn.
English PEN: Malorie Blackman shares PEN Pinter Prize 2022 with Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace – “PEN Pinter Prize 2022 winner Malorie Blackman announces Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace as the International Writer of Courage 2022.”
Literary Hub: How Women Writers Speculated Fictional Futures Free From Patriarchal Control – “Lisa Yaszek on the feminist history of science fiction.”
Africa is a Country: Reading List: Edna Bonhomme – “The author writes about books whose true power comes from excavating the perennial endemic diseases that never leave our sight.”
Fine Books & Collections: John Carter’s Book-Chat – Seventy-five years of Taste & Technique in Book Collecting.
Metropolis: Found in Translation – “Tackling Japanese literature as a couple, one line at a time.” Eric Margolis speaks to co-translators Doc and Reiko Kane.
Nature: Violent conservation, and your brain on magic: Books in brief – “Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.”
Scroll.in: A new translation of ‘Saundarya Lahari’ has revived the ancient Sanskrit text for modern readers – “An excerpt from Mani Rao’s introduction to her translation from the Sanskrit of Saundarya Lahari: Wave of Beauty, said to have been composed by Adi Shankara.”
Prospect: How The Waste Land became the most quotable book of the last 100 years – “With its many places, ages and languages, The Waste Land disturbed the piped music of modernity,” writes Jeremy Noel-Tod.
The Spectator: Good riddance to long books – “The Booker has put the short back into shortlist – and about time too,” writes John Sturgis, veteran journalist for The Sun.
Slate: Hilary Mantel Never Stopped Being Haunted – “In the Wolf Hall trilogy, one of our greatest writers found a story as big as her talent.”
Asia Sentinel: China’s Novelistic ‘Soft Power Invasion’ of Vietnam – “Gooey romance novels thrill everybody but the [Vietnamese] government.”
The Age: A new wave of sci-fi that has plenty to say about today’s world – Jane Sullivan finds there’s a new crop of science fiction and fantasy from writers of colour, and writers with diverse and migrant backgrounds.
Hazlitt: ‘The System Isn’t About Justice or Rehabilitation’: An Interview with Hugh Ryan – “The author of The Women’s House of Detention on forgotten prison history, the incarcerated LGBTQ population, and women being punished for entering the public sphere.”
Middle East Eye: Hanan Issa: The Welsh National Poet on her mission to elevate ‘difficult women’ – “The poet talks to [Adama J Munu] about her influences and how her mixed Iraqi and Welsh heritage has impacted her work.”
Montreal Gazette: Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal finalists announced – “Heather O’Neill [is] among the honourees for her novel When We Lost Our Heads.”
WBUR: The WBUR Read-In: ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ – WBUR arts and culture fellow Lauren Williams recommends three books from Iranian women and on global feminism.
The Walrus: 100 Years of Mavis Gallant – “Her stories are about the cost of living and the cost of love. It’s why they still endure,” writes Heather O’Neill.
LARB: What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: On Patrick House’s “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness” – Henry M. Cowles reviews Patrick House’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness and finds the writer’s brains to be remarkably similar to Wallace Stevens’ birds in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
BBC Norfolk: Russell Crowe’s £5,000 donation wows Norwich bookshop – “An independent bookshop trying to secure its survival said it had received a “bonkers” £5,000 donation from film star Russell Crowe.”
Air Mail: The Case of the Light-Fingered Litterateur – “When a framed photograph went missing during a Paris Review party, the avant-garde revellers became suspects in an old-fashioned potboiler,” reports George Pendle.
Boston Magazine: Take a Peek inside the Impeccably Designed Beacon Hill Books & Café – Lisa Weidenfeld invites you to explore Beacon Hill Books & Cafe – “Boston’s newest bookstore destination.”
CrimeReads: The Best Fiction About the Theatre – “Joanna Quinn on the rare magic of books set in and around the theatrical world.”
Al-Fanar Media: Moroccan Poet Documents Other Arab Poets’ Work at Expense of Writing Her Own – Diaa Hamed finds the “Moroccan poet Fatima Bouhraka has channeled her creative energies into documenting modern Arab poetry and poets for more than a dozen years now.”
The Millions: On the Cult of Craftism – “If craft is a writer’s fundamental heartbeat, then craftism is hypertension,” suggests GD Dess.
Psyche: Remembrance of telephony past: what Proust made of the phone – John Ashridge looks back at an article penned by Marcel Proust for Le Figaro in 1907, in which he discussed in some detail “the relatively new technology of the telephone.”
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FINALLY >>
If there is something you would particularly like to see on Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.
NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.