An end of week recap

“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”
– Charlotte Brontë (born 21^st April 1816)

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.

* One For the Fantasy Fans *

If you are up for a month-long fantasyfest, Imyril (of There’s Always Room for One More) and her team will soon be back with Wyrd and Wonder – an enlivening “celebration of all things fantastical.” From 1^st to 31^st May, and with a theme of Comfort Zone, preparations are in progress to “welcome back veterans and embrace first-time adventurers” so that everyone can enjoy a deal of chat about movies, dramas, music and, most importantly, books. This year, the organisers have been “cooking up ideas to spark your imagination and warm your heart” – including two official “read-alongs”. To check out the schedule, which includes a “prompt challenge,” meet the hosts, choose a graphic, pose a question or two and generally join in the fun, please mount your dragons and coax them in the direction of Weaving some Wyrd & Wonder. I hope you have a pleasant flight.

* 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 Guardian: ‘The anti-pet of bourgeois life’: why the world needs big cat energy – “Whether by striking workers, poets or Pussy Riot, our feline friends have long been used as a symbol of resistance – radical by nature, they refuse to be tamed,” writes Kathryn Hughes, author of Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania.

Caught by the River: Caliban Shrieks: Surviving the Daily Grind – “Originally published in 1936, Jack Hilton’s recently unearthed Caliban Shrieks is an essential addition to the proletarian literary canon of the early 20th century, writes Adelle Stripe.”

Los Angeles Times: What Joan Didion’s broken Hollywood can teach us about our own – “Play It As It Lays ranks No. 1 on our list of the best Hollywood books of all time because it speaks to today’s Tinseltown as much as it did Didion’s,” says Matt Brennan.

The Markaz Review: The Arab Writer in Paris; Paris in the Arab Writer – Coline Houssais explores the rich tapestry of Arab literature intertwined with the poetic allure of Paris in this excerpt from Paris en lettres Arabes (translated here by Lina Mounzer).

Quillette: Desire and Ambition – “Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten [with the possible exception of his 1957 novel Room at the Top]. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour,” says Brad Strotten.

Nature: Are women in research being led up the garden path? – Josie Glausiusz reviews a “moving memoir of botany and motherhood,” by Canadian academic Erin Zimmerman, in which she “explores the historical pressures on female scientists.”

Independent: ‘Murder is a kind of making love’: The strange life of Patricia Highsmith, the author behind The Talented Mr Ripley – “Patricia Highsmith set the blueprint for the modern psychological thriller. As Andrew Scott takes on the role of her most famous antihero Tom Ripley in a new Netflix series, Katie Rosseinsky looks back at a literary legend with a dark side.”

The Hindu: ‘Cities in Fiction’, a public digital archive that documents places from literature to serve as memory markers – “Literary landscapes are record-keepers of major demographic shifts, cultural changes, and more, say founders Divya Ravindranath and Apoorva Saini.”

NLR: Sidecar: Possibilities – Following the reissue of her 1969 novel Divorcing, Huda Awan considers the work of Hungarian American writer and intellectual Susan Taubes.

The Nation: A Perilous Activity – In Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment, Alana Pockros finds that “the novelist and critic explores the perilous activity of literary criticism in the era of social media.”

Poets & Writers: Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: How to Write the Unbearable Story – “Three decades of writing and teaching culminate in Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” says Steve Almond of his new craft of creative writing book.

The New York Times: Indigenous Authors and the Challenge of Telling Their Own Story – Julia Bergin reports: “A university program seeks to improve cross-cultural understanding in Australia’s publishing industry.”

Literary Hub: More Than “Friendless” or “Fallen…” Giving Voice to the Women Who Misbehaved in History – Kelly E. Hill, author of the historical novel A Home for Friendless Women, discusses “women defying societal norms in the nineteenth century.”

BBC News: Alexei Navalny: Russian opposition leader’s memoir to be published in October – Helen Bushby reports: “A memoir written by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny before his imprisonment and death is to be published later this year” – all of which he wrote himself.

Asymptote: Translating Indonesia’s On-the-Ground Realities: An Interview with John McGlynn – Sarah Gear talks to translator and founder of the Lontar Foundation John McGlynn about Indonesian literature.

Lux: Mother of Melodrama – Cora Currier describes the books of Italian novelist, poet, translator and children’s author Elsa Morante as dwelling “in the wayward emotions of children, in their intensity, confusion, sympathy, and their unsparing if naïve assessments.”

Jewish Review of Books: Homage to Orwell – “Orwell is best known for the antitotalitarian novels he wrote in the 1940s, […] but his true genius lies in his journalism. We could use some of that now,” feels Matti Friedman.

World Literature Today: Palestinian Women’s Voices in Translation – Mai Al-Nakib recommends “three Palestinian women writers of fiction, from different periods, in different genres, whose work has been translated into English.”

LARB: When Tolstoy Met Trollope: On Sophie Ratcliffe’s “Loss, a Love Story” – Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters “is a combination of thematic memoir and literary essay,” which, says Bob Blaisdell, rolls along “the tracks of various train journeys across time, place, and reading.”

Nippon.com: The Ashihara Hinako Tragedy: “Sexy Tanaka-san” and the Moral Rights of Authors – Takahori Fuyuhiko explains: “When manga creator Ashihara Hinako was found dead on January 29, 2024, it drew attention to her work Sexy Tanaka-san and its adaptation for television in ways going against her wishes as author. There is a need to rethink the rights of the original creators when translating their vision to new media.”

Electric Literature: Predicting the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Bradley Sides and his colleagues are “betting on these contenders for this year’s most coveted literary award in America.”

The Moscow Times: Pushkin House Announces Short List for 2024 Book Prize – The annual award aims to shine a light on some of the best books about Russia and its neighbours.

Nation Cymru: Publisher unearths early Welsh science fiction novel – “A Welsh publisher has released a book which is likely to be the earliest Science Fiction novel written in the Welsh language,” says Stephen Price.

Nautilus: Viva la Library! – “Rebel against The Algorithm,” advises Charles Digges. And while you are about it, “get a library card.”

The Conversation: Winnie Dunn’s debut novel Dirt Poor Islanders is an impassioned response to detrimental stereotypes – Winnie Dunn’s novel, according to Jessica Gildersleeve, is the very first to be published about the Australian Tongan community.

Public Books: Between the Book Club and Booktok: Community Reading in Montreal – Page Break, a weekly hour of silent reading hosted by Montreal’s De Stiil bookstore, reveals broad generational differences in forms of literary community, finds Adam Christopher Hill.

Poetry Foundation: Eternity Only Will Answer – “Funny, convivial, chatty [The Letters of Emily Dickinson by Cristanne Miller] upend the myth of her reclusive genius,” informs Maya C. Popa.

Daily Maverick: New Daughters of Africa — expanding the breadth of crucial intergenerational conversations – Phillippa Yaa de Villiers finds Margaret Busby’s anthology, New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, “celebrates the power of compelling voices.”

The Public Domain Review: Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce – “In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth.”

Backpack: The 50 Best Hiking, Trekking, and Walking Books of All Time – “The next best thing to hitting the trail?” Peter Moore answers: “Hitting these books.”

Dirt: Money diaries: Real writers, real budgets – “This is part of a new series on The Middle Class Writer” in which four different writers speak anonymously “about the role of money in the life of a writer in 2024.”

Bookforum: Absence Makes the Heart – Christine Smallwood looks at Playboy and Love Me Tender, the first two volumes in a trilogy by the French lesbian author Constance Debré. She describes them as autobiographical “novels of transformation.”

The New Times: A look at Genocide in Rwandan literature over past 30 years – “From memoirs and autobiographies to historical accounts and books for children, Rwandan authors continue to offer authentic voices and perspectives on the complexities of memory, trauma, and resilience, ensuring that the voices of the Genocide victims are never forgotten,” says Patrick Nzabonimpa.

Jacobin: Édouard Louis: Your Identity Isn’t Private Property – French Novelist Édouard Louis “was asked if he thought someone lacking his experience of homophobia could stage a theater adaptation of one of his books. In his response, he argues against a restrictive idea of identity as a property some of us own.”

Nepali Times: Reading up on Communism at Nati Bajra’s – “Kathmandu readers used to flock to a tiny bookshop to buy books by Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung,” recalls Anil Chitrakar.

Psyche: Fiction has a special power to give us insight into our flaws – Martina Orlandi suggests “losing yourself in a book, film or show provides a useful mirror for character – one that is hard to access in real life.”

Sixth Tone: How ‘Farming Literature’ Became China’s Hottest Genre – “Originally a male-dominated genre about territorial consolidation and conquest, farming lit is offering China’s women a fantasy world in which they don’t have to be perfect to succeed,” writes Zhou Min.

History Today: When Nostalgia Was Deadly – “When it was first named in 17th-century Switzerland, nostalgia was a very real – and very dangerous – disease,” says Agnes Arnold-Forster, the author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion.

NPR: It’s a wild ride to get to the bottom of what everyone’s hiding in ‘A Better World’ – “A very sinister thriller with a dash of science-fiction and full of inscrutabilities,” Sarah Langan’s A Better World “is as entreating and creepy as it is timely and humane,” finds Gabino Iglesias.

Vox: Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. – According to Constance Grady: “It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers.”

London Review of Books: Hayward of the Dale – In her review of Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, Mary Wellesley writes: “One of the earliest terms for both the vagina and the womb is the Old English word cwitha. I shared this with my best girlfriends. They said it sounded like a lovely village in Wales, filled with men of melodious voice. This seemed apt.”

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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: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Constance Debré, Fantasy, Kathryn Hughes, Laur Vallikivi, Reading, Steve Almond, Wyrd and Wonder 2024