An end of week recap

“You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.”
– Harold Bloom

Here we are at the start of another fresh year, surely no more than a couple of months since the last one. I’m not known for making New Year’s resolutions as to do so is generally the kiss of death as far as achieving personal goals is concerned – literary or otherwise. Nonetheless, I aim to finally make some headway with my #ToveTrove project and tackle several outstanding ambitions (which will, for the moment, remain undisclosed less I jinx myself).

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 folk have on their nightstands 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.

* Get Real and Get Ready for Non-Fiction Fun *

Over at Book’d Out, Australian book blogger Shelleyrae is again hosting the Nonfiction Reader Challenge, a popular annual literary happening that aims to “encourage you to make nonfiction part of your reading experience during the year.” To get involved, you need only “select, read and review” between one and 12 titles from the named categories at 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge (HOST), then attain your goal/s by 31^st December 2025. The event kicked off on the 1^st January, but worry not, for you can sign-up at a time to suit yourselves. Please head on down (under!) to Shelleyrae’s place for all you need to know about participating. She will be sharing “a series of posts designed to inspire your [choices], and each month [will] link to a selection of reviews from the Linky,” so she respectfully requests you ensure “you are subscribed to Book’d Out.”

* Take a Fictional Flight in your Armchair *

Another challenge that started on the first of the month is Mark Joseph Jochim’s Crossing Continents Challenge 2025, which, he says, involves “travelling around the world [by reading] books.” Now in its second year, this enjoyable journey “through fiction set on each of the seven continents with some additions based on transportation or genres” includes monthly prompts and regular posts by the host in which he reveals his chosen books and offers reading suggestions to others. All genres are permitted – “mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction” and so on – but cannot be non-fiction titles. If you would like to accompany Mark, a US expatriate who has been living in southern Thailand since 2004, please peruse Announcing the Crossing Continents Challenge for 2025 and sign up to take part in the event using the Mister Linky button at the end of the page.

* Almost Overlooked *

I proffer two recently rediscovered pieces for your delectation. (1) In her post, The Artist by Lucy Steeds – a beautiful portrait of an artists isolated existence in the French countryside (at Comfort Reads & Writes), Jess shares her pre-publication observations on The Artist, an historical novel not due for release until later this month. British author Lucy Steeds’ tale, set in a remote part of Provence in 1920, “follows an aspiring journalist,” who is “invited by his favourite artist to travel to his home and write an article on him, or so he believes.” The book is “full of intrigue,” offering regular “reveals that keep the story going” and motivates you to turn to the next page. Furthermore, its exploration of “a very Virginia Woolf, Room of One’s Own feminist message” via the female protagonist, played a huge part in Jess’s enjoyment of the story. All told, she found the book “steadily paced” and tenderly written with a “satisfying conclusion.” (2) Last February, academic researcher Paul Thompson reviewed Poyums by the “young Scottish poet,” feminist and mental health advocate Len Pennie for his innovative and immensely readable blog, Taxonomy Domine. The verse in this collection, which is described by him as “sharp, aimed, and delivered on target,” gets to grips with “issues such as spite and violence toward women.” Rather than mere entertainment, her work is “polemic” and “hard-hitting.” Indeed, we are cautioned in Review: ‘Poyums’, by Len Pennie that this is not a book you should “abandon until you have read it to the end.”

* 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 within the last couple of weeks:

Book review – Jane McMorland Hunter (ed.) – “Bedside Companion for Book Lovers” – Liz Dexter’s final review of the year for Adventures in reading, running and working from home, the Bedside Companion for Book Lovers (a collection of literary curiosities edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, “a serial creator of anthologies for Batsford and the National Trust”), was a “super,” year-long, dip-in-every-day-type-read. She was soon “galloping through” at the rate of “two pages [or less] each night – indulging in content ranging across poetry, prose, memoir, essay, fiction, letters and diary entries,” and ripping through “the centuries from a good while ago” to modern times. “Sometimes a little theme [continued over] a few days; sometimes there [was much] nice contrast.” Overall, this collection of literary amusements was thoroughly enjoyed.

* 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, here are a selection of interesting snippets: 

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Literary Hub: The 167 Best Book Covers of 2024 – “As is now Literary Hub tradition, [Emily Temple once again presents] the 176 best book covers of the [previous] year—as chosen by 54 of the industry’s best designers.”

A Narrative Of Their Own: New Year’s Resolutions – Kate Jones explains how and why she is “taking a leaf out of Virginia Woolf’s diaries as inspiration this new year.” 

The Arts Fuse: Book Review: Lutz Seiler’s Vision of German Reunification, “Star 111” — Dropping Stars Thick as Stones – Tom Connolly writes: “Lutz Seiler’s novel [Star 111] is part of the post-reunification literature landscape, in this case a brilliant exploration of the personal and political viewed through the consciousness of a pensively bedevilled protagonist.” 

Air Mail: Maeve Brennan’s New York – The Long-Winded Lady, the “collected stories of a mid-20th-century Irish writer in Manhattan [recalls] a bygone era of Truman Capote and 50-cent martinis.”

Cornell Chronicle: Poets in Japan experiment at the edge of media – During the past century, experimental poets in Japan have been stretching the conventional definition of the genre by creating poems in unexpected places, according to a Cornell researcher. Here Kate Blackwood speaks to Andrew Campana about Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media. (A free eBook version of this title is available through Luminos.)

A Reading Life: Issue 101: The Reading Life of… Matthew Long – Petya K. Grady speaks to Matthew Long about “the work that goes into a meaningful life as a reader and how to plan a deeply satisfying 2025 reading list.”

The British Columbia Review: From oat milk to tarot decks – A “wonderfully varied, worthwhile collection” that features 16 stories by new writers and literary heavyweights and “is about as solid as short story collections get,” says Jessica Poon of Best Canadian Stories 2025, selected by Steven W. Beattie.

New Eastern Europe: From Poland-Lithuania to science fiction – Tomasz Kamusella writes: “Science fiction is a genre that aspires to predict the human future through the lens of expected technological progress. Few realize that it emerged from the tragic experience of Poland-Lithuania’s Jewish community during the dark 20th century.”

BBC News: ‘Masterful’ novelist David Lodge dies aged 89 – Paul Glynn reports: “Author and critic David Lodge, best known for his Booker Prize-nominated comic campus novels Small World and Nice Work, has died at the age of 89.”

The Korea Times: From sci-fi to healing fiction, Korean books cross borders in 2025 – “A wave of Korean literature is set to reach English-language readers in 2025, ranging from a new novel by a Nobel laureate to science fiction bestsellers and heartwarming healing fiction,” says Kwon Mee-yoo. 

Guardian Australia: The 25 best Australian books of 2024: Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Nam Le and more – “Guardian Australia’s critics and staff pick out the best of the best” of last year’s books. 

The Asian Age: Book Review | Portrait of an open wound – “Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Sanatan is a history of the present, examining […] the fate of several generations of a family belonging to the Mahar caste across parts of the 19th and 20th century […] and an account of the deep, enduring evil of caste violence in India,” writes Varun Andhare.

Traveling in Books: Wolf Crawl: A Look Back – “You don’t always fall in love with a book the first time you try it,” says Kim – but this one is special.

JSTOR Daily: Fear and Fertility in Elif Shafak’s Black Milk – In her 2007 memoir Black Milk, British Turkish writer Elif Shafak “exposes her terror over motherhood’s potential to devour creativity—a panic she imagines sharing with a parade of literary forebears.”

The New Statesman: Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon complex – “In Napoleon Symphony, the life of the French statesman was transformed into a virtuoso romp that still dazzles 50 years on,” says John Banville.

RTÉ: 10 books we’re looking forward to reading in 2025 – Belfast writer Aimée Walsh has “pulled together a list of the [Irish] prose titles we’re sure to be seeing on prize lists and bestseller charts [this] year.”

The Common Reader: Reading Jane Austen – “The first thing you must do if you want to read Jane Austen is to put all adaptations out of your mind. Do not watch them.” Henry Oliver on “learning to become a Janeite.”

The Atlantic: Apocalypse, Constantly – “Humans love to imagine their own demise,” observes Adam Kirsch in his review of Dorian Lynskey’s exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world, Everything Must Go and Glenn Adamson’s kaleidoscopic story of futurology, A Century of Tomorrows.

University Times: Where Dublin Reads: A Guide to the City’s Most Popular Book Clubs – “Chloe Feldman gives the scoop on Dublin’s best book clubs.”

Vox: Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis? – Constance Grady on “the questionable statistic at the heart of the ‘men don’t read fiction’ discourse.”

The Conversation: 6 best African sci-fi and fantasy books to read – “So what are the best sci-fi and fantasy novels, short stories and anthologies to add to your wishlist?” Six scholars “who specialise in African sci-fi and fantasy [were asked] to pick” their favourites.

Engelsberg Ideas: Daniel Defoe’s journeys of the mind – “Three centuries on from the publication of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, the English writer’s travelogue remains unsurpassed,” says Malcolm Forbes.

History Today: New Year, Old Books – For Eleanor Parker, “a new book for the new year is an old British custom, but an old book can be even better.

Alison Fincher Reads Japanese Lit: 2025 New and Upcoming Japanese Fiction Releases – A “list of titles from Japan translated into English for publication in 2025” – not including manga, light novels and picture books.

UnHerd: The torture of an unphilosophical life – Agnes Callard suggests, “the difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty.”

Scroll.in: ‘The Year of the Hare’, a 1975 Finnish novel, shows how to create your own miracle – Sayari Debnath tells us Arto Paasilinna’s amusing novel, The Year of the Hare, “was first published in Finland as Jäniksen vuosi. Herbert Lomas translated the book into English in 1995.”

The Nation: Novelist on a Deadline: Barry Malzberg, 1939–2024 – “A speed demon at the typewriter, Malzberg wrote quickly and brilliantly in a variety of genres including mystery, thrillers, and erotica, but his core work was in science fiction,” recalls Jeet Heer.

Open Book: In Dangerous Memory, Charlie Angus Unpacks the 1980s and the Many Ways that the Decade Still Haunts Us – By way of introduction to this interview with Canadian author, journalist, broadcaster, musician and politician Charlie Angus, author of Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, the OB correspondent describes growing up in the 1980s as living through “societal and political turmoil.”

Penguin: How I came to write In Search of Amrit Kaur – “Livia Manera Sambuy, author of In Search of Amrit Kaur, shares the riveting story behind the book’s inception.”

The Times: ‘Cosy kink’ — the biggest books trend you’ve never heard of – “Digital-savvy publishers have invented a twee new trend: romance novels that blend cinnamon buns and bonking,” discovers Johanna Thomas-Corr.

Prospect: Tolkien the timekeeper – “The author of The Lord of the Rings was an incorrigible poet. A new collection of his verse [The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien] sheds light on his major preoccupations,” finds Henry Oliver.

PublishingState.com: Exploring Book Cover Trends in 2025 – “As publishing adapts to digital landscapes and diverse global readerships, book covers reflect technological changes, aesthetics, and consumer expectations.” Zul Musa “delves into the key book cover trends defining 2025, exploring how these trends merge art, culture, and innovation.”

The Irish Times: Read this and weep: Books that made writers cry – “John Boyne, Edel Coffey, Ferdia Lennon, Sarah Gilmartin and a dozen other authors and critics on books that had a profound emotional effect on them.”

Nippon.com: Japan’s Prizewinning Books of 2024 – Takino Yūsaku with “all the books from Japan that won the Akutagawa Prize, Naoki Prize, and other leading literary prizes in 2024.”

Sydney Review of Books: Through a Glass, Darkly – “Reviewing John Morrissey’s collection of short stories, Mykaela Saunders shows how the author’s flexible use of speculative fiction suspends the reader between allegorical explorations of colonisation and an investment in the weird and beautiful.”

ActuaLitté: In Jules Verne’s House: Travels, Books and Adventures – “Nestled in the heart of the city of Amiens,” Nicolas Gary visits the House of Jules Verne – his home from 1882 to 1900 – and enjoys “a fascinating dive into the world of one of the most prolific and visionary authors of the nineteenth century.”

Defector: The Best Things We Read In 2024 – “This is what the Defector staff enjoyed reading in 2024.”

Oxfam: Richard Osman tops Oxfam chart as most-donated author of 2024 as charity celebrates record-breaking book sales – According to Oxfam: “Best-selling author Richard Osman is the ‘most donated’ writer to Oxfam shops in 2024, as the charity celebrates a record-breaking year for book sales.”

Polygon: Fantasy author John Wiswell explains the ‘Tetris method’ that can keep you productive in 2025 – John Wiswell tells Tasha Robinson: “I gamified solving plot problems — that’s so much easier than getting over burnout.”

Open Culture: An Illustrator Creates a Kindle for Charles Dickens, Placing 40 Miniature Classics within a Large Portable Book – A student set out to explain the concept of a Kindle to Charles Dickens. 

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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: #ReadNonFicChal, #ToveTrove, 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge, Christina Scull, Crossing Continents Challenge 2025, Farai Mudzingwa, Harold Bloom, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane McMorland Hunter, Jeff VanderMeer, Len Pennie, Lucy Steeds, Michael Visontay, Wayne G. Hammond