An end of week recap

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
– Jasper Fforde (born 11^th January 1961)

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.

* Where Next for Reading Wales? *

I share a few thoughts and feelings about Dewithon (aka Reading Wales) and its future in Time to Say ‘Hwyl’.

* History! You Couldn’t Make It Up… Could You? *

Melburnian book blogger Marg W is again hosting the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge and invites those interested to gen-up and sign-up at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. Firstly, you should pick a reading level from a list of six – each one varying in difficulty from 2 to 50 + books over the course of the year – then steadily read and review each title on a platform of your choice. Next, head over to the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2025 Sign Ups page and add your link, name and book title to the Mister Linky. “Any sub-genre of historical fiction” is acceptable, says Marg, including “Historical Romance, Historical Mystery, Historical Fantasy, Young Adult” and so on. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: any fool can make history, but it takes a great writer to fictionalise it – so please don’t miss out on this historic reading jolly.

* The State of Independents *

I was delighted to see Lizzy Siddal (Lizzy’s Literary Life) and Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) are again hosting Reading Independent Publishers Month for the fifth time in succession. After a spike in support for the 2024 event, with “some amazing involvement from readers and bloggers,” the ladies are keen to welcome everyone to join in the fun this February. Focussing on “small presses,” participants are asked to read materials “from publishers who are currently operating as independents.” For all you need to know about taking part, I suggest you first peruse Announcing Reading Independent Publishers Month 5 #ReadIndies before selecting your indie titles from anywhere in the world.

* More, You Say? *

There are innumerable reading events currently running or about to begin – so many, in fact, that I can barely keep up with them all. The list includes, but is certainly not limited to 1. 2025 #TBRChallenge, 2. 2025 Beat the Backlist, 3. 2025 New Release Reading Challenge, 4. 2025 Library Love Challenge, 5. 2025 Audiobook Challenge, 6. Bookish Books Reading Challenge and… well, let’s leave it there for now and I may share a few more in next week’s wind up – but I’m sure you get the gist.

* Almost Overlooked *

Blowing the dust off a past post: Last August Ketelen Lefkovich shared her views on debut novel, And He Shall Appear, a story of obsessive friendship written by English author Kate van der Borgh. So “profoundly” did its “quintessential Dark Academia text” affect her, she was still unable to “convey [her] thoughts into words” over a month after finishing it. The “unnamed narrator” – a musically gifted male student who bonds with a wealthy, charismatic classmate – is “one of the most curious and enthralling aspects” of this tale, says Ketelen, and its overriding themes are those of “profound longing” and “active pursuit of one’s place in the world.” To find out why she was “thoroughly and completely shattered” by this book, I suggest you wing your way over to A History of Crows and alight on {Dark Academia} And He Shall Appear — Kate van der Borgh.

* 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 so:

Hope Never Knew Horizon – Victoria Best found Douglas Bruton’s historical novel, beginning in Wexford County in 1891, “unusual” – and she explains why in her review of Hope Never Knew Horizon at her literary salon, Tales from the Reading Room. Based on actual events (and narrated by a “series of different characters” over a period of 126 years), the story concerns a beached whale, which, she says, the reader follows from “its floundering death off the coast of Ireland to its final resting place in the Natural History Museum.” Victoria provides some intriguing background information on the various taletellers and is clearly impressed with the author’s “ability to write with lucid simplicity and yet produce beauty, depth and emotional affect.” His prose “has a gossamer quality” and the “storytelling […] is light, elastic, and more powerful than it seems.” A work of “deep feeling yet consistently […] happy,” the “world” he constructs is “a beautiful and joyful place to be.”

* 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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The Cut: Screaming for Freedom Corky the Orca’s cries from captivity have shattered glass. I know the feeling. – Adapted from Christina Rivera’s exploration of caring and mothering on a planet in crisis, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women.

Literary Review of Canada: Different Strokes – J.R. Patterson discusses Mavis Gallant’s Montreal Standard Time and Carol Shields’ The Canadian Shields. 

Read the Classics: Round-up – New Classics, January 2025 – Henry Eliots selection ranges “from Baggesen and Buzzati to Morante and Rachilde.”

Asymptote: Eat Their Words: On the Translator’s Appetites – In Xiao Yue Shan’s essay she explores translation “as a physical, materialist phenomenon.” By “comparing the craft of language-transformation to the corporeality of eating and digesting,” she reasons, “the role of the translator is expanded beyond a secondary conduit of texts, and posited instead as the owners of a unique, private production.”

BBC Wales: Our culture isn’t fantasy – so stop misusing it for mystical books – Is it patronising for fantasy writers to appropriate Welsh language and literature to make their stories seem more mystical and magical? Catriona Aitken investigates ‘the Tolkien effect‘.

The Paris Review: A Diagram of My Life – In an interview with Louis Klee, Australian writer Gerald Murnane shows her “the chart he used until the mid-sixties to map out the major events and memories of his life—including his birth, James Joyce’s death, his childhood moves around the suburbs of Melbourne [and] personal crises.”

NPR: How Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumous novel was rescued from a fire and published – Nearly lost in a fire, Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel, The Life of Herod the Great, is out more than 60 years after her death. The novel expands on her interest in the ancient king of Judea.

Asian Review of Books: “Rethinking Japan’s Modernity: Stories and Translations” by M William Steele – Ian Rapley, the Senior Lecturer in modern Japanese history at Cardiff University, looks favourably upon Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, describing it as “a collection of standalone chapters, grouped around a loosely unifying theme.”

The Drift: I Bet People Will Join Us – Many years ago, “as an intern at an English-language publication that champions translated literature,” Na Zhong asked the editor how he handled ‘translation style’. In her words: “He looked at me, puzzled. ‘What’s that?’ It was my turn to be tongue-tied. ‘It’s a quality… permeating a work of translation… that immediately tells you it is a translated text.’ He didn’t get it. I let the topic drop.”

Public Books: Women on the Verge – In his review of Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, Aidan Ryan comments: “Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.”

Salmagundi: Martin Amis and the Changing of the Guard – David Herman “first encountered Martin Amis in 1983” as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. “A new generation was in town, and ten years later the editor of Granta, Bill Buford, wrote [this piece] about them.”

LARB: The Evil That Lies Beneath – Cory Oldweiler reviews Muscovite author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel, The Lady of the Mine (translated by Antonina W. Bouis), which “highlights Russia’s efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014.”

The Wall Street Journal: ‘A Woman in the Polar Night’ Review: The Ritters in the Arctic – Reissued recently by Pushkin Press Classics, A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter is a memoir recounting “a couple’s glacial adventures in the early 1930s.”

The Irish Times: Anne Enright: ‘I am a proud Dubliner, born and reared. I spurn these lyrical types yearning for the rural’ – “Like poet Donagh MacDonagh wrote, it is the ‘arrogant city’ that ‘stirs proudly and secretly in my blood’.”

Speculative Insight: Families of the Future – “In this essay, [Nina Niskanen explores] family in science fiction through the lenses of Octavia Butler, Charlie Jane Anders, Starhawk, John Scalzi, and Martha Wells.”

A Narrative of Their Own: Intentional Reading – Kate Jones on planning her reading life and “how it eludes [her] rebel-reader mindset.” Here she shares a few helpful suggestions for those, like her, who are struggling.

The Public Domain Review: Happy Public Domain Day 2025! – Each 1^st January is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works has its copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here are a few 2025 highlights.

The Hudson Review: The Heroic Industry of the Brothers Grimm – David Mason gives an in-depth review of Ann Schmiesing’s The Brothers Grimm: A Biography – the first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Publishers Weekly: Writers to Watch: Spring 2025 – With the first publishing season of 2025 now fully underway, Matt Seidel spotlights 10 of this spring’s biggest and buzziest fiction debuts.

The Markaz Review: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s Defiant Exploration of Palestinian Life – Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type crafts a deeply intimate portrayal of Palestinian life, offering a nuanced, defiant exploration of identity, memory and belonging,” says Zahra Hankir.

The Daily Star: Through folklore and fantasy: An ode to Bangla mythological characters – If you “are someone in love with mythology or […] a lover of Bangla literature, there is much nostalgia awaiting you in the pages of Otiprakrito, says Tahseen Nower Prachi.

Meduza: ‘The number of words you can say keeps shrinking’ – Kristina Safonova “investigates how wartime censorship has (and hasn’t) reshaped Russia’s book industry.”

Unknown Literary Canon: What does it mean to be a “they”? – “For a dystopian novel, it’s quite beautiful and cozy,” says Jo of Kay Dick’s They – an out-of-print classic for many years, “until McNally Editions reissued it” in 2022.

The Observer: Impoverished authors are told they should do it for the love. Try saying that to a dentist – “The average income for a writer is now £7,000. For our sake and the country’s, we need financial assistance,” says Gareth Rubin.

The Common Reader: Seventieth anniversaries. 1955 was a very good year. – “The 1950s was a vintage decade for literature—fiction and non-fiction” and “there are many splendid seventieth anniversaries this year,” says Henry Oliver, as he looks “beyond the centenaries.”

The Bookish Elf: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong – Due to be published later this year, Ocean Vuong’s novel The Emperor of Gladness – described here as “A poetic symphony of human resilience and connection” – is “a work of profound beauty and quiet strength” that “lingers long after the final page.”

Los Angeles Times: Paco Ignacio Taibo II: A book-reading advocate in the era of TikTok – “The acclaimed novelist and historian runs Mexican government publishing house El Fondo de Cultura Económica,” finds Patrick J. McDonnell.

JSTOR Daily: The Editor Who Drove Hemingway Away – “Harry C. Hindmarsh, assistant managing editor of the Toronto Daily Star, knew how to get under Ernest Hemingway’s skin,” writes Emily Zarevich.

Hyperallergic: Alphabets Might Be 500 Years Older Than We Thought – “Archaeologist Glenn Schwartz unearthed four ancient clay fragments in northern Syria bearing inscriptions that may be the earliest known alphabetic writings,” says Isa Farfan.

Arts Hub: Upcoming Australian fiction and non-fiction for 2025, January to June – “What will be in Australian bookshops this year? [Thuy On shares] a selection of new titles that will be released in the first half of 2025.”

ZYZZYVA: The Era of Prohibition as Feminist History: Q&A with Gioia Diliberto – Christine Sneed speaks to Gioia Diliberto, author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition – “an immersive and meticulously researched examination of the forces behind the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

The Conversation: Can old racists change? Book tracks seven years in a South African nursing home – God’s Waiting Room, the study of (mostly white) residents and (mostly black) workers at an old age home in South Africa, took place over seven years and it upended stereotypes,” writes Casey Golomski.

Women’s Prize: How to incorporate primary sources into your writing – Primary sources are essential when writing non-fiction, but seamlessly embedding them into your narrative can be hard to navigate. In this piece, Dr Paula Del Val provides practical advice on using primary sources in your writing.

The Marginalian: The Promethean Power of Burnout – Maria Popova talks “the tedium of being yourself,” approaching “the final horizon” of a project or chapter in life and David Whyte’s Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

BBC London: Rare Charles Dickens items to go on show at museum – “A collection of rarely-seen items connected to 19th century writer Charles Dickens are to go on show at the London museum dedicated to his life and work.”

Cleaver: An Interview with Joeann Hart, Author of Arroyo Circle – “In her latest novel, Arroyo Circle, JoeAnn Hart explores the climate crisis. What does it mean to address climate change and our complicity in today’s world and today’s political climate? Here, she discusses issues raised in her eco-fiction novel with writer and editor Catherine Parnell.”

Books of Titans: The Immortal Books – Erik Rostad will “be reading these Immortal Books over the next 15 years.”

The American Scholar: The Writer in the Family – “The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero.”

Euronews: Eça de Queiroz, a noble figure in Portuguese literature, transferred to the National Pantheon – Ema Gil Pires reports: “The remains of Eça de Queiroz, author of major works of Portuguese literature such as [The Maias and The Crime of Father Amaro], will now remain in the National Pantheon, 125 years after his death.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune: So you say you’re bummed there was no new Ann Patchett novel this year? We have ideas… – Chris Hewitt suggests a number of “recent books a Patchett fan will love.”

Vintage: 12 Vintage Classics That Belong on Your 2025 Bookshelf – “Discover why these 12 Vintage classics remain must-reads for book lovers in 2025.”

Slate: The Dictionary of PC – Adrian Daub, author of The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, looks at “how 1990s Europe took an American culture war and ran with it.”

Times Union: Grondahl: George Zebrowski, prolific sci-fi writer, 78 – “Acclaimed by science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke, Zebrowski shared his Bethlehem home with his partner, fellow writer Pamela Sargent,” says Paul Grondahl.

Adweek: A TikTok Ban Would Leave BookTok Reeling – The banning of TikTok in the US is, according to Ian Morris, “a prime example of the influence of niche communities, and its peril [offers] a lesson to marketers across sectors.” 

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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: Christina Rivera, David Whyte, Dewithon, Douglas Bruton, Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, Jasper Fforde, Kate van der Borgh, Kay Dick, Reading Challenges, Reading Independent Publishers Month 2025, Reading Wales, Sergei Lebedev