An end of week recap

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”
– Eudora Welty (born 13^th April 1909)

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 and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* Read Montgomery in May *

Those of you who have been winding up the week with me for at least the last twelve months will be aware that blogger Naomi MacKinnon of Consumed by Ink and writer and editor Sarah Emsley have been hosting regular L.M. Montgomery readalongs (see #ReadingLanternHill and #ReadingStoryGirl). Well, I am pleased to report they are busily organising their next literary challenge in honour of this venerated Canadian author, which will take place next month. The ladies are planning to reread Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910) – “one of Montgomery’s early novels” – and they would love for you to join them. If you fancy participating, please visit Naomi’s #ReadingKilmeny: A “Kilmeny of the Orchard” Readalong or Sarah’s Let’s read Kilmeny of the Orchard in May (#ReadingKilmeny) for all you need to know.

* Discover Great (Fe)Lines in Fiction *

Reading the Meow was a categorical success in 2023, so Mallika Ramachandran of Literary Potpourri is preparing to host another “week-long celebration of cats and books or,” she mewses, “should that be cats in books?” It matters not for in either case, “anyone who’s interested is welcome to join in.” The event, which runs from 10^th to 16^th June, encourages readers to pick up “as many or as few books as you like [featuring] a cat (or cats)” and share your thoughts in your blogs and on social media (remembering to include the #ReadingtheMeow2024 hashtag). Your preferred puss, says Mallika, “should preferably [play] a relevant part” in the storyline – but otherwise you are free to devour (as if a juicy mouse) anything from “Golden Age mysteries to modern-day cosies and memoirs including books where cats themselves investigate” – satire and light-hearted humour are also purrfect. For more details, please pad over to Announcing Reading the Meow 2024: A Week-long Celebration of Cats and Books and catch up with the (litter)ary crowd.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are so many talented writers posting high-quality book features and reviews, it was difficult to pick only this one – which was published over the last week or so:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall – review – As “a huge fan of epistolary novels,” A Letter to the Luminous Deep was obviously the ideal book for From First Page to Last’s Janet Emson. A tale of E who “lives alone in the underwater house of her childhood” – a structure “designed and built by her deceased mother” – she becomes friendly with “scholar Henerey [Clel] who resides above on a floating university.” They share many interests and begin corresponding but, inevitably, their bond “soon develops” into something far deeper. However, when the pair suddenly vanish (presumed dead), it takes the involvement of their siblings to unravel the mystery. “The letters,” says Janet, “allow the reader to dip into the book or to get caught up in the correspondence” and the “underwater setting is cosy rather than claustrophobic.” In summary, she describes Sylvie Cathrall’s fantasy as “a book to dive into” and declares it “simply lovely.”

* 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:   

****************************

Literary Hub: Advertising as Art: How Literary Magazines Pioneered a New Kind of Graphic Design – An excerpt from Allison Rudnick’s The Art of the Literary Poster in which she discusses “the rise and fall of the 19th century ‘Literary Poster’”. 

BBC News: Lynne Reid Banks: The Indian in the Cupboard author dies aged 94 – “British author Lynne Reid Banks, who wrote books including The L-Shaped Room and The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.”

The Japan Times: Are visual novels ready for a great leap forward? – “Where reaction time and manual reflexes are in other genres, visual novels prize critical thinking and the ability to interpret characters’ motivations,” says Samantha Low.

Humanities: Lowell, Plath, and Sexton in the Same Room – “Late in the winter of 1959, poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were both auditing a creative writing seminar at Boston University led by Robert Lowell,” recalls Steve Moyer. “The three,” he says, “were very different writers, but each had recently embraced or was gravitating toward a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its mining of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address.”

Reactor: Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Power of Pleasure – “In three of her stranger works, Butler asks us to interrogate the nature of pleasure, and the relationships and connections made possible through desire.”

Arts Hub: Brisbane’s bookshops: navigating challenges with community and innovation – “Sales are down nationally,” reports David Burton, “but book shops in Brisbane are moving with the times and seeing rewards.”

World Literature Today: The West’s “Other” World Novel – “Even though the Latin American novel was never the West’s ‘Other,’ [Juan E. De Castro’s The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel,] published by Oxford University Press does a marvellous job of producing a sorely needed remapping of the continent’s contributions to the genre,” says Will H. Corral.

Nautilus: Does Science Fiction Shape the Future? – Namir Khaliq has “conversations with visionary science fiction authors on the social impact of their work.”

NLR: Sidecar: In Pieces – Trevor Quirk examines the fictions of Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, which he describes here as “catalogues of a shattered humanity.”

Prospect: Graphic novel of the month: ‘Spiral and Other Stories’ – “With its slow-burning reflections on nature and rough-hewn art style, Aidan Koch’s new collection [Spiral and Other Stories] doesn’t look or read like a conventional comic. And that’s precisely what makes it so powerful,” says David McAllister.

The Booker Prizes: The International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist ‘interweaves the intimate and political in radically original ways’ – On 9^th April, “the 2024 shortlist for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction, [was] announced.”

Star Tribune: Duluth’s Leif Enger returns with stunning novel ‘I Cheerfully Refuse’ – Laurie Hertzel describes I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger’s science fiction novel set in a USA of the not-too-distant future as “almost pitch-perfect, with a harrowing tale and beguiling characters.”

The Conversation: ‘I hope publishers will be brave’: older women are often erased in fiction – but in 2 new Australian novels they take centre stage – Mature women have “all but been erased” in contemporary fiction, says Carol Lefevre. However, she has recently discovered “two novels by Australian authors [featuring] older women as main characters.”

My Kolkata: How Karuna Ezara Parikh’s Book Club is revolutionising contemporary reading experiences for Kolkata – Pooja Mitra invites you to “explore the world of contemporary authors and their captivating narratives with other book lovers in [Kolkata’s] literary scene.”

Harper’s: Redeeming Time – Adam Phillips reads from an excerpt of Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, “a book co-written with Stephen Greenblatt, which will be published next month by Yale University Press.”

Wasafiri: Exclusive Extract: In Conversation with Margo Jefferson – “In this wide-ranging and generous interview with Franklin Nelson,” the American writer, critic and journalist Professor Margo Jefferson “discusses the critic at work and play.”

LARB: Frame Tale: On Christine Smallwood’s “La Captive” and Chantal Akerman – Lori Marso reviews Christine Smallwood’s book La Captive, the fifth published title in the Decadent Editions series in which the author explores Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner.

N+1: Tree, Chair, Cone, Dog, Bishop, Piano, Vineyard, Door, or Penny – Following her death earlier this year, Lyn Hejinian is remembered by Colin Vanderburg as an influential force in the world of experimental poetics and founding figure of the Language poetry movement.

Words Without Borders: Thriving on Indiscipline: An Introduction to Quebec’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Scene – “Hannah Allen-Shim takes us on a tour of Quebec’s science fiction and fantasy scene, from its beginnings in the 1970s to its expansion and diversification in recent years.”

Transfuge: Salman Rushdie in the Arab World: Between the Fatwa and the Icon – “On the occasion of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, [… Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder] how,” asks Omar Youssef Souleimane, “is the author of The Satanic Verses perceived today in the Arab-Persian world?”

Radio Free Europe: Siberia In The 1700s: What A French Astronomer Witnessed In Russia – Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche vividly depicted life in Russia in his 1761 book A Journey Into Siberia – copies of which, says Amos Chapple, now “sell for thousands of dollars.”

Deccan Herald: A literary oasis in the desert – “Civilizations and cities historically thrived adjacent to rivers, roads, and seashores. Recently, airports have also started catalysing township development,” observes V Raghunathan in this piece on the Bhadariya Library.

The Wire: Reading Kashmir Through Literature, Film and Text – “Amrita Ghosh’s new book [Kashmir’s Necropolis] argues that the texts reveal a curious gap within our critical vocabulary and taxonomies when it comes to investigating questions of violence and resistance in newer literatures, art, and film on Kashmir.”

TLS: Life at the sad café – “Carson McCullers: a novelist of the marginalized and ‘those struggling to understand who they are’.” Tom Seymour Evans shares a few thoughts on Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn.

Interview: In The Stone Home, Crystal Hana Kim Uncovers a Dark Chapter in Korean History – “When I’m writing, I always start with questions, but I don’t necessarily expect to find answers,” says the author of The Stone Home, a new novel about the legacy of South Korean internment camps.

Guardian Australia: How to Knit a Human by Anna Jacobson review – a remarkable memoir of psychosis – “After undergoing electroconvulsive treatment, the author powerfully documents how art helped her recover her memory, autonomy and sense of self,” says Catriona Menzies-Pike in her review of Anna Jacobson’s memoir How to Knit a Human.

El País: Mariana Enríquez, writer: ‘A woman’s body has very particular fears’ – “The Argentine author [of the recently published A Sunny Place for Shady People] returns to the disturbing world of ghosts and paranormal phenomena with a new collection of stories,” says Andrea Aguilar.

Welsh Icons: Family links with Italian PoW inspires new novel – “A lifetime link between her family and a former Italian prisoner of war has inspired [Filò,] a new novel by award winning Bala author Siân Melangell Dafydd.”

Swedish Book Review: Swedish Folk Tales – An Evolving Tradition – “Anna Maria Hellberg Moberg delves into the changing landscape of folk tales and storytelling traditions across Sweden.”

Shondaland: How Amanda Anderson Created a Safe Space for Romance Book Lovers – “Last summer, Anderson left behind her corporate job and opened the Last Chapter Book Shop [in Chicago’s Roscoe Village], a store dedicated to romance enthusiasts of all kinds.”

RKC: The Mind Of Middle-Earth: Exploring The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien – Isaiah Flair reviews the revised and expanded edition of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, which, he says, is “a treasure trove of insights.”

Psyche: Censoring offensive language threatens our freedom to think – Historian Paul Ham argues that “the modern obsession with textual purity stems from a misapplication of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Derrida.”

Franceinfo: “Mademoiselle” and “Héliogabale”: two previously unpublished works by Jean Genet published by Gallimard – “A play and the screenplay of a film written by the author of Les Bonnes [have just been] published […] by the famous publishing house.”

The Critic: Murders for April – “April is the cruellest month, breeding detective fiction out of the dry land,” observes Jeremy Black.

Al Jazeera: Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Literary giant, revolutionary hero, domestic abuser – Tafi Mhaka reasons, “the allegation that the revered Kenyan author used to beat his wife should start a new conversation on tradition, patriarchy and women’s rights on the continent.”

The Telegraph: JK Rowling’s victory over Humza Yousaf’s hate crime laws is a victory for all women – “The author humiliated the SNP with a lesson in solidarity, sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no – she’s a rockstar,” declares Suzanne Moore.

Alta: The Year of Living Dangerously – “In her novel The Tree Doctor [an erotic novel exploring the need to balance care of others with care for oneself], Marie Mutsuki Mockett traces an affair of the heart.”

Penguin: ‘Nuclear war happens in seconds and minutes, not days and weeks’: How I researched the end of the world – “In her own words, journalist and bestselling author Annie Jacobsen shares how she carried out research for her latest book, Nuclear War.”

Big Issue: I wouldn’t exist if not for a gruesome mass murder in 1905 – we owe our lives to chance and chaos – Brian Klaas, author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything Matters, “celebrates a messy, uncertain reality by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes.”

Writer’s Digest: Why Write Climate Fiction? – “Author Thomas R. Weaver attempts to answer the question of why writers should consider writing climate fiction.”

The Walrus: How Dennis Lee Cooked Up Alligator Pie – “One man’s war against what he called ‘pious versicles’ led to an enduring work of children’s literature,” says Brooke Clark of Canadian poet Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie.

TRT World: ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ copy on sale for whopping $1.5M – A copy of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “on display at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is signed by the author and decorated with almost 30 carats of diamonds and a sapphire.”

Salon: Books are trash too: Remember to throw them away during spring cleaning – “I used to hold on to books as if they were cash, before realizing that all books are not created equally,” admits editor D. Watkins in a piece that may well distress faithful bibliomanes.

****************************

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: #ReadingKilmeny, #ReadingtheMeow2024, Amrita Ghosh, Cat Books, Eudora Welty, L.M. Montgomery, Leif Enger, Reading the Meow, Seichō Matsumoto, Sylvie Cathrall