Winding Up the Week #402

An end of week recap

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
– Willa Cather (born 7^th December 1873)

Following a literary lull of sorts after ‘nonstop November’, it seems increasingly likely January 2025 will be a relatively busy month for those who like to participate in several reading events at once – in fact, there are three likely challenges mentioned in this week’s wind up alone.

For the moment, however, the minds of many are filled with matters festive and some are struggling for readerludes (i.e. bookish interludes) between (or possibly during) family get-togethers, pressie wrapping sessions, winter solstice home purges and ridiculously long hours spent baking mince pies, frying for Hanukkah or preparing piping hot noodles for Japanese New Year. Allow me to assist, if I may, since over the next three weeks I intend to fairylight tempting titles, draw your attention to all things (g)literary and share a soupcon of seasonal bookish goss. Hopefully, my wind ups throughout December will enable you to wind down. For a while, at least.

As ever, 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 publications, 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.

* Eco Swing Like a Pendulum Do *

Six years ago, Annabel Gaskell launched a project that involved re-reading The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s historical mystery novel located in 14^th century Italy. She enjoyed the experience so much that she is again planning a month-long reading challenge in January, this time devoted to one of his earlier works, which she has dubbed Echoes of Eco II. She intends to re-read Foucault’s Pendulum, the late Italian medievalist’s 1988 speculative fiction story about the Knights Templars. A “literary thriller, that is steeped in references to Kabbalah […], conspiracy theories, alchemy [and] the rotation of the Earth, which Foucault’s Pendulum was designed to show,” the book is occasionally, if somewhat cheekily referred to as ‘the thinking man’s Da Vinci Code,’ though it predated the novel by over a decade. Everyone is “more than welcome” to take part in #EchoesofEcoII or simply “pitch in with your recollections and observations, whether you read the book too or not.” If you would like to spend your long winter nights (or should that be knights?) absorbed in a medieval mystery, please make haste to AnnaBookBel’s to study her edictes.

* A Year of American Masterworks *

Our favourite annual doorstopathon gets under way next month with practised host Nick Senger, only this time it’s all happening at Nick’s Chapter-a-Day Read-Along (his new centre of operations) and not One Catholic Life. The 2025 American Masterpieces Chapter-a-Day Read-Along (the eighth such event) involves “reading some of the most important and beloved works of American literature” – all “sweeping epics of grand scope.” From 1^st January to 31^st December, participants will be encouraged to read Roots by Alex Haley, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville at the manageable rate of one chapter a day and “in order of increasing complexity and depth.” Nick invites you to join him in “reading these masterpieces,” spending with him “a full year exploring the human spirit in the context of the American story.” If you have the stamina to tackle these weighty classics, each one with “the power to move a reader emotionally and spiritually,” please check out Nick’s directions for taking part at Announcing the 2025 American Masterpieces Chapter-a-Day Read-Along and prepare yourselves for a bold but thoroughly worthwhile reading journey.

* Spend 2025 with an Irish Literary Legend *

Cathy Brown of 746 Books and Kim Forrester from Reading Matters are again collaborating on a literary challenge, this time to celebrate the life and work of the late great Edna O’Brien (1930-2024) – the Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer who once scandalised Catholic Ireland with her book The Country Girls (1960), which portrayed her mother country as a place where young women could be feisty, sexual beings. The hosts are extremely “excited” to take on this year-long project and will each read “one of her books every alternate month and [then] review [their] chosen book in the first week of that month,” allowing them “to cover 12 books in total.” A Year With Edna O’Brien commences January 2025 and you are invited to read along with them. Should you “decide to participate, whether on your own blog or social media accounts, please tag [both Cathy and Kim] and use the hashtag #EdnaObrien2025. You can check out the “proposed reading schedule” and other important details at Introducing a Year With Edna O’Brien.

* Almost Overlooked *

Last April, Baltimore dweller and horror aficionado Heaven Leigh of Ghoul Digest shared her thoughts on C.E. McGill’s Our Hideous Progeny – a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, complete with sapphic undertones. Set in mid-19^th century London, married couple Mary and Henry Sutherland, “both avid students of palaeontology,” are depicted as “ambitious, [but still waiting] to receive the recognition they feel they deserve for their research and discoveries.” She, a great-niece of Victor Frankenstein, “unearths the notes [he] left behind” and “hatches a plan” to “alleviate their financial woes” (which have been exacerbated by “Henry’s secret gambling addiction”). They will create “life from dead materials” in an experiment that previously “ruined the life” of Mary’s ancestor. Heaven describes this gothic historical novel as “a slow-burn,” filled with “ambience” and “beautiful prose.” To learn why she was “pleased with the exploration of sexuality in this story” and impressed with its “incredibly straightforward” feminism, please head over to Review: Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill.

* 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 the last week or two:

The Party by Tessa Hadley: Coming of age in post-war Britain – Despite previously having “mixed experiences with Tessa Hadley’s novels,” Susan Osborne of A life in books says she “enjoyed” the British author’s historical novella, “which sees a party in post-war Bristol mark a significant step along the path to adulthood for two sisters.” At only 114 pages in length, “Hadley packs a great deal into” The Party, including such issues as “class, social norms, marriage and gender in post-war Britain” – all the while portraying “the old order […] as decadent and debauched.” Sue found the “bomb-damaged” city was “strikingly evoked” and “part of the attraction” was, for her, a familiarity with the area. Happily, she has no qualms in recommending this book to others and is now planning to add “a collection of Hadley’s short stories to [her] to-buy list.”

* 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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Caught by the River: Homecoming – “A seasonal extract from [Homecoming,] Melissa Harrison’s latest book — a month-by-month guide to plug you back into the rhythms of the natural world.” 

Liberties: Edna O’Brien: Documentary of A Writer and A Star – “Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story the new documentary from Irish writer and film-maker Sinéad O’Shea […] is a detailed look at [an] extraordinary artist’s near-century of a journey,” says Sheila O’Malley.

History Today: Books of the Year 2024: Part 1 – “Imperialism and India, spies and seafarers, paganism and the polis: the first 12 of 25 historians choose their favourite new history books of 2024.”

In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi: Rebel Musix: A new book from Vivien Goldman linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz – Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe: Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz from Vivien Goldman, “the musician, journalist, reggae scholar, and ‘Professor of Punk’ at NYU” is “overwhelming” in its “sheer breadth of pieces.” 

Publishers Weekly: Climate Fiction Grows More Realistic – “As the facts of climate change manifest in real life, authors are finding that the future is all too present,” finds Jasmina Kelemen.

The Observer: How I brought a Jewish wartime refugee’s lost fairytale back to life – “Ulrich Boschwitz, who wrote the recently rediscovered thriller The Passenger, left another gift behind him when his life was tragically cut short. Jonathan Freedland explains how he “had the honour of reinterpreting [King Winter’s Birthday] for today’s children.”

Chicago Review of Books: Looking for a Revolution: Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed” at Fifty – It may be fifty years old but The Dispossessed remains “a must-read [because] it is the gold standard of literary science fiction,” says Christopher Bigelow. It has now been republished with a foreword by Joy Fowler. 

School of the Uncomformed: For the Love of Language: Unlocking Classic Literature with 217 Words – “Doubleplusgood vs. Dickens, A Christmas Carol reading guide, and free words” – Ruth Gaskovski and Peco with a “study guide of classic words.”

Winnipeg Free Press: Honing her voice – In his review, Douglas J. Johnston examines “Mavis Gallant’s first foray into writing [now] collected in compelling new account.”

Counter Craft: Four Translated Novels I Enjoyed This Year – Lincoln Michel recommends “some lovely and strange translated novels published in the last couple years.”

Crime Fiction Lover: Going to the Dogs by Pierre Lemaitre – “Pierre Lemaitre is a master of the thriller whose books can be hard, unsettling and downright violent at times,” says Sonja van der Westhuizen, so “don’t be fooled by the cosy-style cover of his latest novel” – the French bestseller, Going to the Dogs.

4 Columns: In Thrall – “Jane DeLynn’s newly republished [LGB] coming-of-age novel [In Thrall] set in the pre-Stonewall ’60s is comedic, haunting, and decidedly untidy,” says Andrew Chan.

Buzz: The Bridge Over The Neroch: a Soviet literary gem from a cult author – Explore the human condition in Leonid Tsypkin’s for many years undiscovered classic of 20th-century Russian literature, The Bridge Over the Neroch and Other Works, a profound blend of novellas and short stories.

The Hedgehog Review: History Bedeviled – Paul Nedelisky encounters “the signs and wonders of the early modern mystics” in Carlos M. N. Eire’s exploration of incredible events, They Flew: A History of the Impossible.

New Lines Magazine: The Lives of Gulf Migrants in Malayalam Literature – “Since the 2008 novel Goat Days punctured the glamorous image of working in the wealthy Arab states, many more stories have run with the theme,” says Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, author of The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging.

Stevereads: The Best Books of 2024: Literature in Translation – Steve Donoghue shares his reprinted books in translation highlights of the year.

Cleveland Review of Books: Revisionist Histories: On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman” – In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman. Here Sophie Poole reviews Hannah Regel’s debut novel, The Last Sane Woman.

JSTOR Daily: The Two Worlds of Patrick White – “In writing and life, the Australian Nobel Laureate was ever preoccupied by the search for spiritual meaning and the fraught relationship between God and blundering humanity,” says Ben Woollard.

Plough: Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future? – “Learning that one’s job might soon be eliminated by the emergence of an overhyped new technology puts one in good company,” says Phil Christman.

Big Think: 5 beloved fantasy novels based on real history – “Many fantasy novels are praised for their world-building and the depth of their lore. However, more than a few of these fantasy worlds owe a debt to the real-life history on which they are based. From ancient Chinese journeys to 19th-century American politics, [Scotty Hendricks explores] the historical influences of five famous fantasy works.” 

The Irish Times: Donal Ryan wins An Post Irish Novel of the Year Award for Heart, Be at Peace – Donal Ryan has won the An Post Novel of the Year Award with his “incredible and thought provoking” book, Heart, Be at Peace.

Inner Life: Grapes, Grit, and Grandeur: My Year with John Steinbeck – Matthew Long shares his “thoughts on reading Steinbeck’s complete works over the course of one year.”

Women’s Prize: The Sliding Scale from Commercial to Literary and What Exists In Between – “Serena Arthur, Commissioning Editor at Footnote Press and Bonnier Books, offers her thoughts on what makes fiction commercial versus literary and reflects on her love for novels that sit somewhere between the two.”

Reactor: Looking Back at Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions Trilogy – Anthony Aycock considers “the groundbreaking anthology series [Dangerous Visions], long delayed and finally completed.”

ABC: November’s best new books, from Rosalie Ham’s latest novel to a stranger-than-fiction memoir from Lech Blaine – If you’re looking to stack up your summer reading pile, here’s an excellent starting point, with new releases from Rosalie Ham, Lech Blaine, Haruki Murakami and more.

The New York Review: Irresistible Iris – “Iris Murdoch’s readers return to her to understand the relationship between high intelligence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.”

California Review of Books: The Chutnification of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – In his recent essay, Brian Tanguay observes that since the great political novel Midnight’s Children was first published in 1981, “the world’s most famous democracy, the United States, seems to have lost faith in its efficacy and promise.”

The Kyiv Independent: Opinion: Gogol, the Ukrainian Kafka that Russia couldn’t claim – “Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian soul writing in Russian, exposed the dissonance of straddling two cultures, bound to one yet compelled by the other,” says Vitaly Portnikov.

The Dial: The Treachery of Translation – Irina Dumitrescu scrutinizes “three recent novels [exploring] the idea of translators as traitors to themselves.”

The Times of Israel: Franz Kafka’s papers metamorphose into National Library exhibit – “Wide-ranging exhibition ‘Kafka: Metamorphosis of an Author’ features the institution’s singular archives and marks 100 years since the Czech author’s death,” reports Jessica Steinberg.

49^th Shelf: Historical Struggles and Maritime Adventures – A recommended reading list of sea adventures by Canadian writer Cathy Converse, author of Frances Barkley: Eighteenth-century Seafarer – a “rivetingly imagined re-telling of the voyages of Frances Barkley (1769–1845), who as a young woman travelled the world on a trading mission with her sea captain husband.”

Texas Highways: Deep Vellum Is Turning Dallas into a Literary Hub – S. Kirk Walsh discovers Will Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum, “is helping champion lesser-known authors.”

The New York Times (via MSN): Mary Is the Bennet Sister We Need – Paula Byrne wonders what Jane Austen would have made of modern readers’ more recent obsession with “bookish” Mary, the middle Bennet sister in Pride and Prejudice.

Littafi: Curing the Pandemic of Cultural Misrepresentation in African Literature – “The accurate literary depiction of cultures in an ethnic melting pot like Africa was always going to be imperfect at best. The errors and false labels are just too much, whether it’s names, food, experiences, language, or simple spellings,” writes Akinwale.

The Conversation: Five speculative novels that can help to understand our relationship with soil – Meg Meredith suggests that by looking at how it is represented in works of fiction, we can try to understand how we relate to soil. And through soil, how we relate to the environment more broadly.

Literary Hub: In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse – “Ed Simon on what Sven Birkerts got right in The Guttenberg Elegies” – a book first published in 1994 examining the future of reading and literature in the electronic age.

Asymptote: The Burden of Bearing Witness: In Conversation with Burmese Poets – “The possibility of a non-political Burmese literature gaining a foothold was brought to a halt overnight by the military’s February 2021 coup,” says Charlie Robertshaw in his essay analysing the influence of Myanmar’s civil war on Burmese poetry.

Poetry Foundation: A Hotel for Poets – “Fifty years after it was published, Elsa’s Housebook remains an intimate photographic document of the literary avant-garde,” says Jackson Davidow.

The Tournament of Books: The 2025 Tournament of Books Long List – “Literary bloodsport approaches! As [the judges] narrow down [the] shortlist of Tournament competitors, here are the 70 works of fiction in consideration from this year.” The winner will take home the coveted Rooster award.

The Paris Review: Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists – “The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, Pantagruel, is a heady celebration of abundance in which sexual organs and epic feasts sit alongside scatological humor. Beneath the absurdity, however, is a deep critique of Renaissance learning,” says Andrew Hui. 

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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.