An end of week recap

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire

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.

* 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 critiques, it was difficult to pick only this one – which was published over the last week or so:

As it happens, this review was published last month but for obvious reasons I held it back for the Dewithon celebrations.

Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, by Paul Clements – “This is very much an old-school literary biography,” says Liz Dexter – well known in book blogging circles as the industrious host of Adventures in reading, running and working from home – in her review of Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides: A Biography for Shiny New Books. Morris is, of course, the warmly remembered Welsh historian, author and travel writer who passed away at the age of 94 in 2020, and Clements apparently holds his subject in high regard as “a personal friend” of some 30 years. The biographer, we learn, has “very good command of his material,” which “makes for a long book” with lengthy “chapters covering a range of years in traditional chronological order.” However, Morris had an “adventurous life,” travelled extensively and was “rather famously […] a trans woman” – so there is much to cover. In addition, the Welsh aspects of the writer’s life and involvement in Welsh language campaigns are examined in detail. All told, Liz says Clement’s account is “carefully referenced,” respectful and she feels sure it will stand as a definite record of Morris’s intriguing life.

* 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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TNR: Amitav Ghosh’s Reckoning With Opium – “His new book, Smoke and Ashes, traces the ravages of British opium on India from the eighteenth century to the present,” says Alexander Zaitchik. 

The Bookseller: Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years due in November 2024 from Harvill Secker – The magical realism novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls – Haruki Murakami’s first in six years – is to be published in November.

The Women’s Prize Trust: Announcing the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist! – The hotly anticipated Longlist for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been revealed.

iNews: Clear by Carys Davies review: An atmospheric marvel – The characters in Welsh writer Carys Davies’s Clear “are so vividly alive, so full of feeling, that you can almost hear their hearts pounding,” declares Nick Duerden.

EL PAÍS: Gabriel García Márquez’s archive in Austin reveals all the secrets about his unpublished novel – Iker Seisdedos writes: “Until August — Gabo’s posthumous book — will hit bookstores on March 12. Underlying this novella by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner are doubts about his desire to publish it, as well as the reasons why his heirs made the decision to do so. EL PAÍS visited the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where five drafts of the short novel — with his handwritten corrections — are treasured, along with the rest of the Nobel Prize winner’s legacy.”

History Today: ‘Reading It Wrong’ by Abigail Williams review – “Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams argues that misunderstanding popular literature was a sign of its success,” writes Natasha Simonova.

ABC News: The Stella Prize 2024 longlist features Katherine Brabon, Kate Mildenhall and Melissa Lucashenko – “The longlist for the $60,000 Stella Prize has been announced at a ceremony at Adelaide Festival as part of Writers’ Week.”

The American Scholar: Iris as Pupil – “Before this canonical English writer [Iris Murdoch] published novels, she was a student of French postwar philosophy,” says Robert Zaretsky.

The Age: Dyslexia helped this bestselling author rewire his brain – British novelist Jasper Fforde’s new novel, Red Side Story, is a sequel to a book he wrote in 2009.

The Irish Times: Reading on the frontline: Ukrainian soldiers find inspiration in bibliotherapy for military morale – “Reading seems to be a basic human need,” says Iryna Kovalchuk. “In Ukraine, a government-supported project gives official recognition to the fact that soldiers fighting against the Russian invasion find solace in books.”

On the Seawall: On How We Named the Stars, a novel by Andrés N. Ordorica – Alexander Pyles reviews debut novel How We Named the Stars by Latino writer Andrés N. Ordorica – a gay love story enacted between the United States and México.

JSTOR Daily: Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem – “Viewing the genre as a means to spread modern knowledge, Chinese novelists have been writing science-fiction stories since at least 1902,” reveals Livia Gershon.

The New York Review: The Party Line – Jonathan Steele reviews The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War, “a new book about Western journalists’ experience in Moscow during World War II [that] sheds light on the problems of media manipulation and self-censorship in coverage of Russia today.”

Esquire: A Crime Fiction Master Flips the Script – “After writing six novels about police detectives in Dublin, Tana French is tackling the characters across the interrogation table. Here, she tells [Sarah Weinman] about The Hunter, her unforgettable new thriller.”

Public Books: Writing Between Collapse and Renewal: Christine Lai’s “Landscapes” – “To exist between collapse and renewal is to live with an awareness that destruction has always been with us” writes Scott Schomburg in this piece about Landscapes, an “exquisite debut novel,” from Canadian author Christine Lai.

Interview: Author Jennifer Croft on the Power of Translation and the Joy of Paperbacks – Juliette Jeffers speaks to the American author, critic and translator about her reading and writing habits – and discovers the inspiration behind Croft’s debut mystery novel set in Poland, The Extinction of Irena Rey.

LARB: The Lord of Auschwitz Asks to See a Priest: On James Bernauer’s “Auschwitz & Absolution” – Jack Miles reviews James Bernauer’s Auschwitz & Absolution: The Case of the Commandant and the Confessor in light of the new film The Zone of Interest.

ABC Books: The best new books released in 2024 so far, as selected by avid readers and critics – Claire Nichols, Sarah L’Estrange, Declan Fry and Nicola Heath select their “favourite new reads [including] the much-anticipated second offering from US novelist Kiley Reid, the final instalment of a sleeper hit series set in Canada’s Métis community and a bold work of First Nations speculative fiction.”

BBC Scotland: Bill Knox: the return of the grandfather of tartan noir – “Decades before Inspector Rebus, Karen Pirie and Jack Laidlaw walked Scotland’s mean streets, two detectives solved the nation’s fictional crimes,” says Pauline McLean.”

Colossal: Wander into This Miraculous Miniature Library with Thousands of Books Made Entirely by Hand – Jackie Andres on German artist Tomas Mayer’s miniature libraries.

Toronto City News: Timothy Garton Ash wins Lionel Gelber Prize for book on modern European history – Timothy Garton Ash has won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize for his book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.

The Yale Review: Rachel Cusk: The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being” – Merve Emre talks to British author Rachel Cusk about her novel Second Place.

The Drift: Stumped​ | Why Write (or Read) a Campaign Book? – Mark Chiusano, author of The Fabulist, asks why political campaign books should matter to anyone other than a candidate.

Reactor: 10 Iconic Fantasy Novels Ripe for Rediscovery – “Someone please adapt these immediately,” pleads Holly Black.

Open Culture: How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever – Austen, says Colin Marshall, “may have been a novelist of great technical proficiency and social acuity, but she also understood the eternal human pleasure of sharing a laugh at the delusional behind their back.”

Commonweal: Dust to Dust – Helen Rouner finds “W. H. Auden writes poetry for a world marked by death.”

The Wire: What Contemporary Hindi Literature Tells Us About the Politics of Hate – According to Rashwita Ravy, between the pages of contemporary Hindi novels, “individual anxiety, grief, social uncertainty and absurdity get a place to be. These books show us how the creation of the bogey of an enemy is essential to ensure that patriarchy and caste hegemonies stay intact.”

The Millions: “She Pierces the World”: Olga Ravn on Doris Lessing – Danish novelist Olga Ravn “discusses the compositional fearlessness of Doris Lessing, best known for the landmark tome The Golden Notebook.”

Literary Review of Canada: For God’s Sake – The fight for and against free thought – Michael Ledger-Lomas shares his thoughts on Elliot Hanowski’s Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada.

Asian Review of Books: “A Woman of Pleasure” by Kiyoko Murata – Alison Fincher describes Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure as “perhaps the best novel about Japan’s pleasure quarters available in the English language.”

Defector: “It Really Matters If Somebody Has Bad Taste”: An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld – Ahead of the release of All Things Are Too Small, Nicholas Russell talks to Becca Rothfeld about her first book of essays, subtitled Essays in Praise of Excess.

Prospect: Lynda La Plante: Modern technology causes ‘formidable’ problems for crime writers – “The detective novelist on how to make your characters get away with it.”

Faber: Behind the Book: God Complex by Rachael Allen – “Rachael Allen shares the prose and poetry that inspired God Complex, her second poetry collection” – described by Faber as “a sweeping and corrosive epic, a narrative poem that tells the story of the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of progressive environmental degradation.”

Granta: Notes on Craft – “It is hard to devote yourself to something that makes you feel constantly like an amateur,” admits Greg Jackson in this short essay on writing and teaching fiction.

Metropolis: Fresh Ink: When You Want to but Can’t – Eric Margolis on the “English-language debut of Kyohei Sakaguchi’s self-help nonfiction writing.”

Cleveland Review of Books: The Body Is Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Emmeline Clein – Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, explains to Glenn Baker: “Because this issue [of eating disorders] has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.”

UnHerd: How universities killed the academic: Flamboyant brilliance has been purged – “Is it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore?” British philosopher and writer Kathleen Stock believes it’s about time academics started “openly laughing at the idiocy on their own doorstep.”

Longreads: Safety Net – “These days,” observes Lisa Bubert, “when you work as a librarian in America, there is no lack of emergencies.”

The Telegraph: How a £15 canvas bag became a ‘middle-class mating symbol’ – “An eco-friendly canvas carrier dreamed up by an independent bookseller has become an ubiquitous class marker for the literati,” finds Guy Kelly.

BBC Scotland: Animal with ‘amazing flatulence’ found in medieval book – “A medieval manuscript held in the care of the University of Aberdeen is believed to have British comedy’s earliest example of an animal joke,” reports Steven McKenzie.

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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: #dewithon24, Amitav Ghosh, Andrés N. Ordorica, Becca Rothfeld, Dewithon 2024, Jan Morris, Paul Clements, Reading Wales 2024, Timothy Garton Ash, Voltaire, Welsh Biography