An end of week recap
“It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those.”
– Iain M. Banks (born 16th February 1954)
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.
* Three Things… Resurrected *
* Devise Your Double Fantasy *
* Almost Overlooked *
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with you a couple of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are so many talented writers creating high-quality book features and reviews, it was difficult to pick only these two – which were published in recent weeks:
* 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:
****************************
Weird Walk: WW BOOK CULT: Stone Lands by Fiona Robertson – Fiona Robertson’s Stone Lands: A Journey of Darkness and Light Through Britain’s Ancient Places, “an inspiring tour of Britain’s megalithic landscapes,” is described here as “a very human journey into grief, hope and love.” She speaks to WW about her explorations of “megalithic marvels.”
The Walrus: My Guilty Pleasure: Wasting Time with Lists – Karen Solie sees lists as “little anarchic reminders to love what is incomplete.”
ABC News: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch had an enormous impact. It’s still felt 50 years on – Fifty years after it was first published, Nicola Heath looks back at Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, a book described as “a relic of its time and a marker of a particular moment in history, but it is also still shockingly relevant in so many ways.”
Dostoevsky Book Club: About Optina Monastery in the novel The Brothers Karamazov – This piece on certain aspects of the Russian classic The Brothers Karamazov is concerned with “the prototypes of Elder Zosima, and Dostoevsky’s visit to the [Optina Monastery] after the death of his son Alyosha,” says story-reader and storyteller Dana.
Literary Review of Canada: Confessions of a Bookseller – In this brief essay, James Lindsay discusses his years as a bookseller in Toronto, holds-forth on titles he has never read and considers Lisa Moore’s 2009 historical novel February.
The Conversation: How the real murders behind the hit novel Butter exposed Japanese media misogyny – “A court found Kanae Kijima guilty of murder. Japanese society also blamed her for the way she looked.” Martina Baradel on the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer who inspired cult Japanese bestseller, Butter.
The Hudson Review: The Sense and Sensibility of an Ending: Accepting the Evitable – Alexandra Mullen reviews Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey’s Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, which provides original and engaging interpretations of “Austen’s endings.”
The Korea Times: Chung Bora’s ‘Your Utopia’ nominated for Philip K. Dick Award – Your Utopia, a collection of short stories by author Bora Chung, is Korea’s first work to be nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, one of the top honours for science fiction books published for the first time in the USA as a paperback original.
The Nation: Vigdis Hjorth and the Novel of Ugly Love – “In If Only, the Norwegian novelist distils a story of romance into all its private discomfort and claustrophobia. Its intense ambivalence [about] love feels truer to life,” writes David Schurman Wallace.
N+1: Mission Drift – Matthew Porges attempts to answer the question: “What would an authentic spy novel be authentic about?”
A Narrative of Their Own: ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ – Kate Jones discusses “the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.” In this post, she turns a scholarly eye on Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger.
The New Yorker: What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End – “Some fear we’ll be buried in brimstone; others expect to be extinguished by A.I. But is there comfort to be found in our apocalyptic visions?” asks Arthur Krystal in his review of Dorian Lynskey’s exploration of our fantasies about the end of the world, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World.
History Today: The Englishman Who Cried ‘Let Ireland Go’ – “In 1920 the English writer Jerome K. Jerome set out the arguments in favour of Irish home rule,” says Oliver O’Hanlon.
The New York Times (via DNYUZ): ‘Demon Copperhead’ Explored Addiction. Its Profits Built a Rehab Center. – “Barbara Kingsolver has put royalties from [Demon Copperhead] her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to work in the region it portrayed, starting a home for women in recovery,” writes Alexandra Alter.
The Indian Express: Amitav Ghosh on the Salman Rushdie attack: ‘Horrified yet awed by his resilience; we’ve forgotten our shared humanity’ – In an interview with Cherry Gupta, “Amitav Ghosh discusses the solitary nature of writing, why recognition and awards should not constrain artistic expression, the challenges of writing in the digital age, and the balance between free speech and sensitivity.”
The Artifice: The Quietly Subversive Poems of Gwen Harwood – Regarded as one of Australia’s finest poets, the late Gwen Harwood was, according to academic Lydia Gore-Jones, a “(quietly) subversive” poet whose “transforming art [was] hidden” within the “apparent banality and triviality of her subject matter.”
Big Think: Nathan Thrall on how to immerse readers in nonfiction writing – “‘The only requisite for nonfiction is that it’s true,’ says Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.”
The i Paper: Eimear McBride changed modern literature – her new novel reminds us why – “The City Changes Its Face may be more of a mood piece than a novel,” says Ellen Peirson-Hagger, “but this author shows us how powerful that can be.”
Brittle Paper: Voices from the Continent: The Importance of Reading African Literature – Delina Yemane Dawit looks at the reasons why “African Literature historically hasn’t been able to keep up with the literary developments of the West.”
Caught by the River: On Meteorites – “As her book The Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space & Deep Time is published by Profile Books, Helen Gordon shares her fascination with these ancient, extra-terrestrial rocks.”
LARB: Dino Buzzati’s Fantastic Universe – Valentina Polcini reviews The Bewitched Bourgeois, a new collection that gathers 50 fantastical short stories by Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906–72). The anthology has been compared by some to “Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone.”
The Arts Fuse: Book Review: “Making No Compromise” — The Story of the “Little Review” That Could – David Daniel on Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review, an “absorbing” analysis that “underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons.”
New Lines Magazine: Taiwan’s Literature Is Having a Moment in Central and Eastern Europe – “Publication of contemporary fiction in Slavic languages is a sign of growing political support for Taipei,” reports James Baron.
The Minnesota Star Tribune: In ’After the North Pole,’ explorer chronicles impossible challenges – Cory Oldweiler describes Erling Kagge’s After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice as an “engaging history of the quest to reach the North Pole from a Norwegian explorer who knows all about extreme trips.”
Unknown Literary Cannon: Sapphic Overtones in Heterosexual Literature – The always engaging Jo, who is on a mission to “catalogue lesbian literature,” scrutinizes Lalla Romano’s 1957 A Silence Shared – an historical novel “set in Italy, during World War II” with added “sapphic elements.”
Publishers Weekly: New Historical Fantasies Reimagine the Past – Liz Scheier finds books in which “tales of magic and mayhem find grounding in historical settings.”
The Critic: Blood, squalor, and a taste of things to come – “Japan’s brutal invasion of China [was] witnessed by four very different literary adventurers,” says Jeffrey Meyers.
The New York Times Magazine: Janet Malcolm Understood the Power of Not Being ‘Nice’ – “The writer is remembered, above all, for her ruthlessness. But when [Katie Roiphe] went looking for it, [she] found something much more complicated.
Vox: A major book publisher announced a change. The industry freaked out. – Constance Grady explains why “those little quotes on book covers became a flashpoint.”
El Mundo: Camilla Läckberg: “Where are the nasty aunts in the novels? I miss them” – “The Swedish author completes her ‘Faye Trilogy’ with Dreams of Bronze, a thriller whose heroines strike first, push all limits and, in the end, discover the value of friendship between women.”
Beyond the Bookshelf: How I Learned to Love Short Stories – Melissa Joulwan offers five tips to turn you on to short fiction, which will also “work for collections of nonfiction essays, too.”
Portland Press Herald: At a fictional Maine college, a popular professor fights campus politics – “Robert Klose’s entertaining satire Trigger Warning pokes fun at academia”, says Thomas Urquhart.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: This Is a Golden Age for University Presses – According to Derek Krissoff, “the focus on efficiency and innovation misses the point: We are producing fabulous books.”
Storymaps: Stephen King’s Maine – A map of Stephen King’s fictional Maine – “Sharon Kitchens in collaboration with the Durham, Maine Historical Society [mixes] fictitious and real-life places in the King of Horror’s literary world” (oldish piece but interesting).
The Home of Agatha Christie: Investigating Agatha Christie’s Travel Novels – Many of Christie’s most famous novels are set on modes of transport: Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile to name a couple. Host of the All About Agatha podcast, Kemper Donovan explores these mysteries and considers what makes them so popular.
Bookforum: Reader, I Divorced Him – Hermione Hoby shares “narratives of marriage and its dissolution.”
Publishers Weekly: Falling in Love in Indie Bookstores – Judith Rosen profiles 24 couples who proposed, or held their weddings, at independent bookstores in Bookstore Romance: Love Speaks Volumes.
Dirt: An IKEA bookshelf’s third coming: The third time may not be the charm – “Rachel Davies on the design history and lacklustre relaunch of a cult IKEA shelf” – not a positive review!
Nation Cymru: Quirky Welsh phrasebooks sell more than 100,000 copies – “Back in 2018, Welsh artist Anne Cakebread approached Y Lolfa” with the unusual suggestion of publishing Teach Your Dog Welsh, a “pocket-sized phrasebook, beautifully illustrated, to help people learn Welsh with their pet.” Six years on, the series has taken off in a big way.
****************************
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.