An end of week recap

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
– Elizabeth Hardwick (born 27^th July 1916)

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.

* Ten Years of #WITMonth *

In this, the 10^th year of Women in Translation Month – a literary event created by Meytal Radzinski of the now dormant Biblibio blog to celebrate “women writers from around the world, writing in languages other than English” – book bloggers and all those who love reading are encouraged to “read, review, and discuss works by women writers in translation” throughout the month of August. The aim is to “spread the word about the Women in Translation project at large and promote individual women writers in translation specifically.” If you would like to join in the fun, simply follow #WITMonth on X, Instagram and/or Booktube – ensuring you use the #WITMonth24 hashtag when posting content relating to the event on social media sites.

* 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 in recent weeks:

A Woman of Opinion by Sean Lusk – Earlier this month, Helen of She Reads Novels posted a review of Sean Lusk’s latest historical novel, A Woman of Opinion, which is “the story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, based closely on her own published letters.” Helen tells us this English aristocrat, medical pioneer, writer and poet born in 1689 “led a fascinating life and [she thoroughly] enjoyed seeing it unfold through the pages…” Narrated mostly “by Mary herself – in a formal, eloquent style that fits the 18th century setting,” the book was a pleasurable read with “no glaringly anachronistic language” and most notably, it raises awareness of Lady Mary’s “role in the development of the smallpox vaccine.” 

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follows a selection of interesting snippets:   

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Harvard Magazine: A Dogged Observer – Daniel Mason, author of North Woods, an historical novel set in New England, “about the process of succession, both human and natural,” takes “the long view” in this interview with Max J. Krupnick. 

BBC Wales: Working with Roald Dahl helped me find Harry Potter – “The publisher who discovered Harry Potter has said working with Cardiff-born children’s author Roald Dahl helped him see the potential in JK Rowling’s novel.”

Byline Times: The Upside Down: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ – “John Mitchinson explores how [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] a 600-year-old poem by an unknown poet can reset our moral compass.”

El Mundo: Else Lasker-Schüler and the search for a love made of miracles – “The most original, uninhibited and unclassifiable German poet builds in this epistolary novel [My Heart], a true jewel of German expressionism, a crude analysis of the individual and the city of Berlin on the threshold of the First World War.”

The Hedgehog Review: Reading as Moral Formation – “Attentional humility,” says Derek King, “opens us to sympathetic reading—a willingness to receive from the text on the author’s own terms.” Here he discusses C.S. Lewis’s and Iris Murdoch’s views on the subject.

Electric Literature: 7 Thrilling Novels Set on Greek Islands – C. Michelle Lindley, author of the provocative lesbian debut novel The Nude, “recommends stories showcasing the splendour of Greece but also its depth.”

Esquire: We Need Speculative Fiction Now More Than Ever – “Amid a terrifying political moment, escapism can be dangerous. But as we celebrate ten years of the Southern Reach trilogy, N.K. Jemisin reminds us that stories can help deconstruct colonial power.”

Words Without Borders: A Splendid Impossibility – “Writer Murat Özyaşar on why he doesn’t write in his mother language and what it means to speak a ‘split tongue’” – translated from Turkish by Will Washburn.

Chicago Review of Books: Loving Sylvia Plath: A Conversation with Emily Van Duyne – Ash Trebisacci spends time talking to Emily Van Duyne about her new book, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.

CBC British Columbia: Vancouver author explores online hate in latest novel – Robyn Harding’s thriller The Haters “considers online hate toward public figures as well as cyberbullying in schools.”

Scroll.in: Not the NYT list: 100 fine books from around the world (and not just the USA) of the 21st century – “A list curated by the Delhi-based bookseller The Bookshop Inc, with contributions from readers, writers, literary critics, and publishing professionals.”

The Collector: 6 Important Female Aboriginal Writers & Activists You Should Read About – “During the 20th century, Aboriginal writers and activists shaped Australia, bringing about change for themselves, their people, and for all Australians,” says Sara Relli.

The American Scholar: Martha Foley’s Granddaughters – Jay Neugeboren on “what the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett.”

The Drift: Time and Time Again – “How should translators — or any writers, for that matter — respond to their critics?” Simon Leter talks “Proust in the age of retranslation.”

The Critic: Postmodern fantasy – “Modern fantasy authors often try and subvert traditional religion, with bleak and unoriginal results, argues Kittie Helmick.”

Rolling Stone: Kamala Harris Book Sales Soaring in Wake of Democratic Presidential Nomination – Tim Chan reports that according to Amazon, “orders of the Vice President’s memoir [The Truths We Hold] were up a whopping 60,378% at one point, with the book now topping multiple charts online.”

Aeon: A novel kind of music – “So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth,” says conductor Joel Sandelson in this piece exploring what classical music and novels have in common.

Times of Malta: Maltese publishing houses plead for help for a sustainable future – PEN Malta fears “the demise of the sector will mean accelerated loss of the collective memory and Malta’s own language.”

Yorkshire Times: Rising Star Jo Callaghan Wins Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year 2024 – Jo Callaghan’s debut novel In the Blink of an Eye has been declared winner of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2024.

Russia Beyond: 5 Best Soviet & Russian dystopian novels – “It was on Russian ‘literary soil’ that this genre essentially originated from, anticipating George Orwell’s iconic 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” says Alexandra Guzeva. Here she takes “a brief dive into what dark matters Russian writers fantasized about.”

The Nation: The Peculiar Legacy of E.E. Cummings – “Revisiting his first book, The Enormous Room, a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling” in the work of e e cummings, finds David B. Hobbs.

Orion: How Not to Write About Whales – Rajiv Mohabir shares “12 tropes to avoid when writing about whales.”

Literary Hub: From Dream to Nightmare: On the Deadly Manifestations of Religious Hatred in India – In this excerpt from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, “Zara Chowdhary remembers [an] idyllic childhood torn apart by violent sectarianism.”

AP: Ernest Hemingway fans celebrate the author’s 125th birthday in his beloved Key West – David Fischer discovers that “more than six decades after [Ernest Hemingway’s] death, fans, scholars and relatives continue to congregate on the island city [of Key West] to celebrate the author’s award-winning novels and adventure-filled life.”

Guardian Australia: For 18 months my stalker persisted. I moved, changed jobs but nothing worked – so I wrote a novel – Ella Baxter, the Melbourne-based author of New Animal and the recently published Woo Woo, writes: “The fear drained from my body and into my manuscript. It was too nuts to ever publish – but I did anyway, in a blaze of fury.”

The Yale Review: Criticism and Truth – “The ‘singularity’ of criticism stems from the singularity of literature, a unique corner of any world.” Jonathan Kramnick, author of Criticism and Truth On Method in Literary Studies – Thinking Literature, explores here the living practice of criticism.

Verso: Yesterday’s Peasants, Tomorrow’s Fascists? – “A new book [Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World] by historian Patrick Joyce explores the lost world of the European peasantry. But, as farmers protest sweep across the continent, what does the future of the agricultural worker look like?” asks Bartolomeo Sala.

Toronto City News: Pankaj Mishra wins Canadian award for international non-fiction writer – “Indian writer Pankaj Mishra has won a prestigious Canadian award of $75,000 for an international non-fiction author.”

LARB: A Dog-Eat-Dog World – “Gisela Salim-Peyer reviews Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s ‘Simpatía in advance of the Venezuelan elections.’”

Tablet: In Drohobych – Edward Serotta goes “on the trail of [the Polish Jewish writer] Bruno Schulz in wartime Ukraine.”

CrimeReads: A Long-Forgotten Mystery by a Much-Celebrated Vaudeville Performer – “Billie Houston earned renown in the 1920s and 30s as a male impersonator and [as] part of a sister act. She also wrote [the] crime novel, Twice Round the Clock.”

DNYUZ: JD Vance’s Book Dropped by German Publisher – “The Berlin-based publisher Ullstein has dropped its German translation of Hillbilly Elegy—JD Vance‘s 2016 memoir—in response to him becoming Donald Trump‘s running mate.”

The Conversation: A delicious history of the apple – from the Tian Sian mountains to supermarket shelves – “By the late 19th century, there were nearly 1,500 varieties of apple in Britain alone,” discovers Serin Quinn in Sally Coulthard’s The Apple.

Big Think: 31 genius sci-fi quotes that offer real-world wisdom – “The 2024 book Damn You, Entropy! 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes by Guy P. Harrison curates some of the most insightful and memorable quotes from various sci-fi works.”

The Villager: Why Reading Online Reviews Of Your Book Will Lead You Nowhere Good – “Even,” says Tom Cox, “if you can’t avoid doing it sometimes.”

Post45: “A list that reflects the world”: An Interview with Peter Blackstock – Tim Groenland interviews Peter Blackstock, VP, Deputy Publisher for Atlantic Books’ imprint in London, Grove Press UK.

Fast Company: A new generation of authors is finally making book merch interesting – Henry Chandonnet is enchanted to discover “Sable Yong’s debut book [Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity] comes with some unusual marketing merchandise—a perfume to match.”

Dazed: Why don’t straight men read novels? – According to Georgina Elliott: “Men often read non-fiction books in the name of self-improvement – but many are reluctant to pick up works of fiction.” She asks, why?

Dwell by Andrew Boryga: Do we really want more male vulnerability in fiction? – “If we actually do, then we’ll have to accept those voices on their terms,” argues Boryga.

The Washington Post (via MSN): Old books can be loaded with poison. Some collectors love the thrill. – Seemingly the pigments used in bookbinding cloth in the 19th century to create vibrant colours is likely to flake off onto your hands. Not good, says Ashley Stimpson – especially if the cover is green.

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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: #WITMonth24, Arunava Sinha, Billie Houston, Daniel Mason, E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sean Lusk, WITMonth, Women in Translation Month 2024