An end of week recap

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
– Robert Fulghum

This is a 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.

* Reading Ireland 2024 *

Reading Ireland Month returns for the eighth time in March and chief hibernophile, Cathy Brown of 746 Books, is taking a more laid-back approach to this year’s event. Gone are the themed reading weeks and reading prompts – this time she invites you to “read what [you] want, when [you] want as long as the author is Irish!” Please “grab” the official logo from Reading Ireland Month is on the way! and start planning your schedules – then, “between 1 and 31 March, post as much as you like about any aspect of Irish literature and culture.” Please don’t forget to use the hashtags #readingirelandmonth24 or #begorrathon24 when posting related content on social media.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *

I am going to share with you a couple 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 limit the list to only these two – both published over the last week or so:

There would appear to be a blogfestation of blues – not of the melancholy or musical variety, I hasten to add, but of the sort that lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. In other words, the colour blue. Has anyone else noticed this recurring theme in recent weeks? What is the explanation? I can only conclude that indigo, azure and ultramarine are this season’s literary in shades for the on-trend book blogger.

For instance, in her recent post, Letter from January, Anna Iltnere, the remarkable creator of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia, wrote about her delight at taking part in a Zoom call with a community of ‘blue editors’ from various parts of the world – the name apparently deriving from their mutual adoration of the sea and water. Over at Fictionophile Lynne wrote a post about blue book covers (Blue Monday? Books are the cure for that) and author Terri Webster ran a piece with the title Sunday Stills Monthly Color Challenge: Ethereal #Aquamarine.

See what I mean? And this is just the tip of the blue-hued iceberg!

In consequence, I have opted to include two recent book critiques, which not only highlight my 0000ff-hexed observations under a blazing blue reading lamp, but also happen to be rather good.

“Art is allowed to lie, it seems, just as writing is.” – It is #ReadIndies month at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and, in a recent post, Karen Langley featured a title from Fairlight Books. Namely: Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton – an historical novel with (would you believe) the colour blue and “all [its] various shades” running through the narrative. This “small but mighty book” tells the “story of Henri, the last remaining working tailor in what was once the Street of Tailors in Paris.” He has run his business there since the 1950s but, alas, he is now the only one left on the row – and the area has turned from “a busy, bustling place full of community and fellow artisans [to a run-of-the-mill] street of shops.” However, the narrative offers a “second strand,” concerning “the budding artist, Yves Klein. Now remembered for his blue paintings and his International Klein Blue patented colour,” who “calls on Henri for a new blue suit.” There is also a third connecting storyline about and elderly man “who stumbles across a blue coloured postcard from a bric-a-brac seller near the Eiffel Tower” – the significance of which is “gradually revealed.” Karen terms this “rich, brilliantly constructed and deeply moving book” a “masterpiece,” and one she says lingers in the mind.

The wisdom of madness: The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi – Palestinian poet, writer and philosopher Hussein Barghouthi’s “posthumously published” autobiographical novel, The Blue Light, is described by roughghosts’ Joseph Schreiber as “a memoir with hallucinations.” A “delirious account of a man desperate to make sense of himself and his unusual way of thinking,” inspired by his time in Seattle in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, when he frequents three establishments – a cinema, a café and the Blue Moon Tavern – where he falls in with an assortment of “eccentric and disenfranchised characters.” The protagonist dreads madness but hides “his fears beneath a mask of sanity,” though, at the end of a game of chess one day, he suddenly exclaims: “Return the blue light naked to its house.” At this point in the narrative, he finally reveals his mental anguish to others. Joseph’s review is well worth reading (I especially enjoyed his introductory paragraph focusing on ‘blue’) for the way he tantalizingly shares the “plenitude of wisdom and insight” found in this book.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (soon, perhaps tooting or bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follow a selection of interesting snippets:

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The Age: Manderley never looked like this: An ode to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – Reviewer Jessie Tu finds Fiction Writer, Jillian Cantor’s new novel, is an engrossing riff on a classic novel. 

Air Mail: Swan Song – “Truman Capote’s social suicide by novel: [Sam Kashner tells] the story behind the new mini-series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.”

Full Stop: The Case of Cem – Vera Mutafchieva – Eamon McGrath reexamines Bulgarian writer and historian Vera Mutafchieva’s novel The Case of Cem, which takes place in the fifteenth century, when the world was crudely split between East and West – not unlike the Cold War, which is when it was first written.

American Purpose: New Wave Dystopia – According to Noah Berlatsky, a “new generation of science fiction authors [are centring] their writing on marginalized people, because they recognize that we typically build dystopias for marginalized people, first.”

Jacobin: China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto’s Enduring Power – “In an interview, author China Miéville explains why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto is such a remarkable work, defending the book against its detractors and arguing that it remains urgently inspiring and deeply relevant.”

Arts Hub: New literary journal set to enrich Australia’s cultural landscape – Richard Watts reveals that a “new journal is driven by Writers SA with the support of the state’s three universities and Arts South Australia.”

Literary Hub: Camp Over Tragedy: On Henry Van Dyke’s Farcical, Irreverent Novel of Black Gay Life in Mid-Century America – “Erik Wood considers his uncle’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes.”

Salon: Exploring your “night self”: How one author embraced the joy of being “Sleepless” – In this piece on Annabel Abbs’ Sleepless, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes: “Insomnia fuelled some of the greatest art women have ever produced, but the darkness can also come with a price.”

The Indian Express: ‘We should not agonise about what is lost in translation’: Geetanjali Shree – “The novelist on how to navigate writer’s block, why translation is not about cloning the original text, and the skills necessary to write fiction.”

Granta: Lifetimes of the Soviet Union – “Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.” Yuri Slezkine, author of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, writes about Soviet history and the generational arc of revolution.

49^th Shelf: Sticky: Books That Linger – Canadian writer Niloufar-Lily Soltani, author of Zulaikha, shares a few books that have “stuck with [her] for various reasons.”

Inside Higher Ed: The Writing Is What Matters – “A book’s quality is not dispositive—or sometimes even relevant to book sales,” says John Warner. “The publisher isn’t going to be able to charge more for my better book. The satisfaction of making a better book is almost entirely personal.”

The Critic: Grimdull – Sebastian Milbank argues that Grimdark, a subgenre of speculative fiction, “is afflicted by a dull and tedious obsession with adolescent cynicism, prurient scenes and one dimensional anti-heroes.”

The Japan Times: Beijing court gives Australian writer suspended death sentence – Kirsty Needham reports that Chinese-born Australian writer Yang Hengjun had been accused of spying for a country China has not identified and the details of the case against him have not been made public.

Reactor: Five Ways Authors Motivate Characters to Leave Earth Behind – James Davis Nicoll suggests you “say goodbye to your home planet and hello to the grim void of space…”

Bookforum: Prairie Swooner – “The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather” – Eric Banks shares his thoughts on Benjamin Taylor’s Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather.

Global Voices: How Rwanda’s literary giants promoted their country’s rich culture through their work – Zita Zage on “authors and poets whose work has preserved Rwanda’s history and future.”

Vogue: The Glitzy IRL Book Party Is Back, Baby – Emma Specter declares live book parties are picking up where they left off for lockdown!

Open: Writing in the Dark – Indian novelist “Raj Kamal Jha’s fiction transforms the news from something that fades into the past into a hologram of the present,” says Arshia Sattar.

Refinery29: Why Are Books Featuring Old Protagonists Trendy Right Now? – In “recent years, we’ve seen a huge resurgence in books that feature older protagonists,” says Abby Corson, author of The Concierge. “What exactly is driving this resurgence,” she wonders, “and why are readers so enthralled by it?”

Newsroom: The strange case of the first Māori author – “David Ballantyne wrote the Great New Zealand Novel in 1968 but is seldom recognised as a Māori author published long before Hone Tuwhare and Witi Ihimaera,” says Jordan Tricklebank.

DW: Gertrude Stein: A complex pioneer of modernism – “Jewish art collector and writer Gertrude Stein was born 150 years ago. She was,” discovers Brenda Haas, “a lesbian icon, hosted Picasso and translated antisemitic speeches.”

The Telegraph (MSN): The Prestige author Christopher Priest dies aged 80 – British novelist and science fiction writer, Christopher Priest – best-known for his fantasy novel The Prestige – has passed away following a diagnosis of small-cell carcinoma last year.

Philosophy Now: Sad Love by Carrie Jenkins – After reading Sad Love by Carrie Jenkins, retired philosophy teacher Stephen Anderson feels “sad about modern writings on love.”

3:AM Magazine: A British Distance: Lars Iyer Interviewed – Markku Nivalainen talks to Lars Iyer, a British novelist and philosopher of Indian/Danish parentage, about My Weil, the latest book from his trilogy.

NIKKEI Asia: Books: Tales of hope from Tibet’s global diaspora – Reading Far From the Rooftop of the World by Amy Yee, Joseph McClellan discovers that Tibetan “emigrants’ stories highlight political clouds hanging over [a] troubled region.”

Hyperallergic: 8 Art Books to Read This February – “Samia Halaby, the collaborative history of photography, ancient cave paintings, shapeshifting flocks of birds, and more for your art reading list.”

Literary Review: Sue Bridehead Revisited – Women play central roles in Thomas Hardy’s novels. These fictional figures appear alongside the real women in his life in Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne – a book that puts his sometimes-tempestuous relations with the opposite sex under the microscope.

Time: An Ancient Roman Scroll on Pleasure Was Just Decoded Using AI – “A Roman scroll, partially preserved when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and decoded using artificial intelligence,” reports Will Henshall.

Literary Review of Canada: Elusive to the End – Sandra Martin on “reading Tolstoy’s masterpiece.”

NPR: In ‘The Fury’ Alex Michaelides wants to turn the murder mystery genre on its head – “Mary Louise Kelly talks to author Alex Michaelides about his new murder mystery, The Fury.”

Parapraxis: Why Is No One Talking about Muteness Envy? – Katie Kadue with “a retrospective on [the late American literary critic and translator] Barbara Johnson.”

Penguin: Books to help you be better at love – With Valentine’s Day coming up on the 14^th February, Penguin has a new Reading List: “Love can be a labyrinth of clichés and conflicting advice, but there are wise experts out there – whether you’re in a relationship, out of it, or just looking to understand yourself better.”

The Atlantic (MSN): Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction – The sci-fi legend coined the term metaverse. But according to Matteo Wong, he was most prescient about our AI age.

The Irish Times: Choosing the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024 longlist – Declan O’Driscoll describes this award as “unique in foregrounding small publishers and awarding the prize to a publisher rather than an author.”

The Korea Times: Future for Korean books globally – Barbara J. Zitwer feels “Korea needs to do more for foreign literary agents.”

Public Books: Gaming the Lyric: Poetry in 8-Bit – Some video games can evoke complex emotions, activate a voice, and cultivate a political imagination—like the best poetry, suggests Maria Dikcis.

El País: Paulina Tuchschneider, Israeli army deserter and novelist: ‘They called me hysterical for talking about the anxiety of being a soldier’ – “The author’s debut novel explores the mental suffering young women face when fulfilling their mandatory military service.” Here she speaks to Noelia Ramírez about her fears.

Electric Literature: Hisham Matar on Writing Male Friendships – “The Pulitzer Prize-winner discusses his new novel My Friends and exile as a form of death” with Ladane Nasseri.

The Telegraph: ‘I hope Taylor Swift fans aren’t disappointed’ – the real author of Argylle, unmasked – “Feverish speculation ends here, as the Telegraph blows the cover of Elly Conway, the world’s most enigmatic spy novelist,” reveals Jake Kerridge.

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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.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #begorrathon24, #readingirelandmonth24, Blue Book Covers, Douglas Bruton, Fairlight Books, Hussein Barghouthi, ReadIndies, Reading Ireland Month 2024, Robert Fulghum