An end of week recap

“The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”
–  May Sarton (born 3^rd May 1912)

Aside from 3^rd May being the 113^th anniversary of Belgian American novelist, poet, memoirist and lesbian activist May Sarton’s birth (see above), it is also Wordsmith Day, a global celebration of people with a passion for weaving words into evocative poems and narratives.

Barely a day seems to pass when we don’t honour something-or-other, for instance, today is also World Press Freedom Day, but for the book blogging community (and writers in general), these occasions provide the perfect opportunity to pen a piece linking literary matters with whatever happens to be taking place. In other words: commemorative dates are exceedingly useful to those seeking a ready supply of fresh content.

While it is clearly too late in the day to write anything on these specific subjects, purely for your amusement (and to flaunt missed opportunities), I will mention that on this date in history, political writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), German playwright August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) and English novelist Dodie Smith (1896-1990) came into the world.

Incidentally, whilst remembering May Sarton, please do check out Victoria Best’s splendid post, Journal of a Solitude: Sarton, Rage and Creativity at Tales from the Reading Room.

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.

* Choose Your Mews *

Tails up! Mallika Ramachandran of Literary Potpourri is preparing to return next month with her annual ailurophile reading challenge: Reading the Meow 2025. During this “week-long celebration” of cats in books, she invites everyone to pick up fictional titles, graphic novels, cosies, non-fiction, poetry collections or anything else featuring a domestic feline (Felis catus), then share reviews and other features from 9^th to 15^th June. Her single stipulation is that the puss in your publication must play “a significant (or at least reasonable) part, not just be present.” Your contributions can be “shared wherever you are comfortable”, including blogs, Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X or even on the official “dedicated page”, which will appear as the event begins. For further information and plenty of suggestions, please see Announcing #ReadingtheMeow2025.

* Don Quixdoorstop Anybody? *

Would you like to join Kaitlyn Beck of Lady Bookish this month in reading Miguel de Cervantes’ magnum opus, Don Quixote? Published “in two parts- 1605 and 1615”, she intends to read both segments, which together “[clock] in at just under 1000 pages”. Kaitlyn says she will “be posting [on her site] throughout the month” about all things relating to this “first modern novel”, including its “historical background and importance, [other works it has] inspired, different adaptations, [her personal] thoughts throughout the reading journey and more.” If you would like to participate, please peruse Reading Challenge Announcement for May! and ensure you include the hashtag #MayofLaMancha if you post related content on social media platforms.

* No More Summertime Book Blues *

We were all feeling rather glum last year when Cathy Brown of 746 Books announced she was stepping down as host of the popular season-long reading challenge, 20 Books of Summer (see WUTW #392). I was therefore delighted to learn that Annabel Gaskell from AnnaBookBel and Emma of Words and Peace will be taking over the event and it will continue as usual from Sunday 1^st June to Sunday 31^st August 2025. As in previous years, participants are encouraged to post reading lists of 10, 15 or 20 books (from TBRs if possible) – though, you can alter them as desired and “swap books in/out” – then simply “enjoy a summer of great reading [while making] a bit of space on your shelves!” Please grab your straw hats and tinted specs before heading over to 20 Books of Summer is back! With new hosts, where you will find all you need to know about taking part. There is even a lovely winter logo available for those in the Southern Hemisphere!

* Almost Overlooked * 

Back in February (so only just straying into overlooked territory), Alison B reviewed English philosopher and sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon’s “first published work of fiction,” Last and First Men, for Reading 1900-1950 – the blog for Sheffield Hallam University’s special collection of bestsellers from this era. Regarded by many as a hugely influential masterpiece, this “ambitious and wide-ranging imaginary account of the future of humanity” spans 2 billion years and is told “from the perspective of a member of the eighteenth species looking back”. While it is “not the sort of book that [one can] read for half an hour before bedtime for relaxation,” says Alison, “it is written with such precision and clarity that it is extraordinarily readable despite [its] highly unusual structure.” To find out why she was “both engrossed and excited by it,” please head over to Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *  

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented writers producing high-quality book features and reviews, which made it difficult to pick only this one – published in recent weeks:

The Darker Sides of the Human Psyche: Marília Arnaud’s “The Book of Affects,” Translated from Portuguese by Ilze Duarte – Award-winning Australian literary translator from the Portuguese, Alison Entrekin, “devoured The Book of Affects in one sitting during a three-hour plane flight.” Its critically acclaimed Brazilian author, Marìlia Arnaud, we are told, has created an “expertly paced” short story collection that is “rooted deeply in psychological realism” and “laced with suspense and emotional intensity”. She explores varied “themes of death, betrayal, illicit affairs, and violence”, which are not devoid of “tenderness” but, nonetheless, are without “happy endings”. All told, Arnaud’s “gripping” work is captivating and will undoubtedly appeal to fans of both “psychological thrillers and literary fiction”.

* 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 New York Times: Journaling Her Way Through Cancer for the Third Time – “Suleika Jaouad’s new book [The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life] provides a master class in personal writing. Here’s why it’s a worthwhile habit — for everyone, not just English majors,” says Elisabeth Egan.

The Conversation: Tove Jansson’s Moomin books explore the power of adventure and transformation – This year marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of the first Moomin tale, The Moomins and the Great Flood. However, as Sue Walsh discovers, this wasn’t the first Moomin book to have an English edition. 

The Public Domain Review: “I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte – “In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal [I Await the Devil’s Coming] at the age of 19. Rereading this often-forgotten debut, Hunter Dukes finds a voice that hungers for worldly experience, brims with bisexual longing, and rages against the injustices of youth.”

Literary Theory and Criticism: Science Fiction – “Though writers and scholars disagree on the precise boundaries of the Golden Age of science fiction and the New Wave, both are associated with the years after World War II,” says Nasrullah Mambrol. Here he discusses important moments in the history of SF.

Books & Culture: Reading as Resistance in Jane Austen – In this piece on the “role of books in [Jane Austen’s] novels,” we are told that in the “carefully ordered worlds of [her] novels, where social decorum and economic concerns dominate, acts of reading often carry a subversive charge.”

Literary Review of Canada: A Doomsday Gap – “The unsettling truth of a Cold War thriller” – David Wilson acquires a copy of Red Alert: “A novel of the first two hours of World War III” and the “template for Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.

The New York Times (via DNYUZ): At 13, Charlotte Brontë Already Knew How Good a Writer She Would Be – “An anthology of her teenage poetry, published for the first time, shows ambition, even if the verse isn’t perfect,” finds Lynsey Chutel.

Publishers Weekly: Highly Anticipated Final Volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust Trilogy Slated for October – After “five epic novels in two series (His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust) that sent [protagonist] Lyra and those around her traveling between worlds, her story will come to an end with The Rose Field by Philip Pullman.”

The Newtown Review of Books: CHRIS FLYNN Orpheus Nine. Reviewed by Robert Goodman – Orpheus Nine, the new dystopian novel from Belfast-born Melbourne-dweller Chris Flynn, “imagines a shocking, and ongoing, tragedy to explore grief, community, and anger.”

ArtsHub: Book review: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney – Robert Cerantonio tells us British science journalist, novelist and non-fiction writer Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global is “an exploration of how hundreds of languages share a single ancient ancestor.”

LARB: Modernity’s Slumber Factory – “Ian Ellison considers Sebastian P. Klinger’s Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929”, an investigation of sleep at the intersection of literature, science and pharmacology in the early twentieth century.

LessWrong: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased? – “Sentence lengths have declined”, says Arjun Panickssery, but “the decline predates television, the radio, and the telegraph—it’s been going on for centuries.” What is the explanation? 

Art of Conversation: The Rewards of Difficult Books – Matthew Morgan on Dante Alighieri’s Inferno “and what it can teach us about the pleasures and rewards of reading challenging books.”

Necessary Fiction: The Passenger Seat – “In the opening scene of The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana’s elegant debut novel, two teenagers teeter, nearly naked, on the rail of a steel truss bridge.” Diane Josefowicz reviews a story of masculinity and “a friendship’s headlong plunge into catastrophe.”

Literary Ladies Guide: Fascinating real-life women, fascinatingly fictionalized – Nava Atlas suggests “recent novels about real-life figures” for those who want to learn “about fascinating women of the past but aren’t inclined to read full-scale biographies that take you from the second they were born (or earlier)”.

Arts Alive San Antonio: Book Review: “Lovers of Franz K” By Burhan Sonmez: Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman – Best known as the “friend of Franz Kafka,” who preserved the Jewish Austrian Czech writer’s work for posterity, Max Brod is an “off-stage character in Lovers of Franz K., Burhan Sönmez’s sixth novel” –  a “philosophical dialogue about the responsibilities of readers to books and authors they love.”

The Daily Star: Transnational identity: Negotiating the choices – Wasiq Azad reviews Reframing My Worth: Memoir of a Bangladeshi-Canadian Woman by Habiba Zaman.

The Common Reader: RIP Jane Gardam – Henry Oliver remembers “a great writer”.

Washington Independent Review of Books: The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura: A Novel – Anne Eliot Feldman reviews The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Francophone Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo, in which a “powerful protagonist unpacks the effects of generational trauma.”

The Literary Edit: Jemimah Wei’s Desert Island Books – “From the big-hearted novel populated by failed promises, to the book that Jemimah returns to again, and again…” Lucy Pearson highlights the eight desert island book choices of Singaporean writer Jemimah Wei, author of historical novel, The Original Daughter.

World Literature Today: Who We Forget When We Talk about Irish Literature: Identity and Northern Irish Authors – “What does it mean to be a Northern Irish writer? Decades after the end of the Troubles, it remains a difficult question to answer,” says Terryn Ward.

Georgia Today: Andrey Kurkov: “Putin has reached the upper limit of geopolitical machismo, and he will remain there until he dies” – Russian-language Ukrainian writer, Andrey Kurkov answers questions about the war and his work.

Miller’s Book Review: Message from Pope Francis: Read a Novel – Joel J Miller looks back at “the late Pontiff’s take on the power of literature for secular and religious readers alike” in a letter written last summer: Letter of His Holliness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation.

The Arts Desk: Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review – seeking refuge – Leila Greening explains: “Notes on danger and dialogue in the shadow of the Swiss Alps” in Hungarian-born German-language writer Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish populate “a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters.”

The Seaboard Review: Skin: Stories by Catherine Bush – Emily Weedon reviews popular Canadian author Catherine Bush’s short fiction collection, Skin, which she describes as “sleek and immersive.”

Japan Forward: BOOK REVIEW | ‘Tales of Plague and Pestilence: A History of Disease in Japan’ – “Written by Shizu Sakai and translated by Marie Speed, this book about diseases and illness in Japan over the centuries is actually a book about human history”, says Robert D Eldridge.

Options: An English translation of Fatimah Busu’s ‘An Ordinary Tale about Women’ aims to honour her voice – “Pauline Fan worked alongside [the Malay] author [on An Ordinary Tale About Women and Other Stories] to bring back 10 out-of-print stories that showcase her brilliance and radical writing,” writes Tan Gim Ean.

The Bookseller: Anna James travels back to Wonderland with a twist on the children’s classic – Speaking to Fiona Noble about her latest book, Alice With a Why: Return to Wonderland, children’s author Anna James declares: “Nonsense is so hard to write. Realising that the nonsense needed to be rooted in real things, almost all the time, really helped me to get the voice and work it out”.

Books & Culture: The Haunted Woman in the Schoolroom: On Governesses in Victorian Literature – “There’s a certain kind of woman who haunts the pages of Victorian novels. Neither mistress of the house nor servant, […] she stands in the threshold of two worlds […] She is the governess”, says Fernanda Korovsky Moura.

BBC England: Letter reveals Shakespeare did not abandon his wife – James Diamond reports: “The relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway may have been happier than previously thought, according to new research.”

Public Things Newsletter: “A Ramble Through the Mind of An Adolescent” (Part 1) – Matthew Lamb, author of the biography Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, shares a transcription of “a talk [he gave] at the National Library of Australia on the topic of Frank Moorhouse’s Juvenilia.” Also see “A Ramble Through the Mind of An Adolescent” (Part 2).

The Tolkien Society: Winners of the Tolkien Society Awards 2025 Announced – Earlier in the week Jeremy Edmonds revealed the winners of The Tolkien Society Awards 2025, which recognises excellence in the fields of Tolkien scholarship and fandom.

Independent: Bestselling German novelist Alexandra Fröhlich found dead on houseboat in Hamburg – “Police in Hamburg have launched a murder inquiry after bestselling German novelist Alexandra Fröhlich was found dead on a houseboat following a violent attack,” reports Shahana Yasmin. “Police say she was shot.”

The Irish Times: Fallow: Ian Maleney on migrating his literary journal from web to print – “After 10 years in the frictionless space of the browser, it’s honestly kind of fun to be worrying about ink and paper and postage,” says Irish writer Ian Maleney.

The British Columbia Review: A ‘wading into a rushing stream’ – “Alison Acheson’s debut novel Blue Hours is an invitation to step into this liminal space, where grief transports a father and son into a state of flux,” writes Trish Bowering.

The Observer: David Sedaris: After I’m long gone, will my niece sell me out to AI? – “I’m as interested in an artificial voice as I am in an artificial author, which is to say not at all”, says American author David Sedaris.

The Oxonian Review: The Enchanting Sadness of Osamu Dazai – The Japanese author and novelist Shūji Tsushima (known by his pen name of Osamu Dazai), whose works are now regarded as classics, died “by suicide on his fifth known attempt on June 13, 1948.” Rubie Lin reflects on No One Knows, “a new collection” of his short stories “translated from Japanese by Ralph McCarthy”.

Literary Hub: What Makes the Octopus So Worthy of Our Eternal Fascination – In an excerpt from The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life, Drew Harvell “explores the otherworldly oceanic lives of cephalopods”.

Beyond the Bookshelf: Celebrating Women in Literature – “From the earliest recorded words to the most celebrated novels of today, women have shaped the literary landscape, often against the constraints of their time,” writes Matthew Long.

Defector: ‘Moby-Dick’ Is Still Too Big For The Opera – Described by his friends as “a person who won’t stop talking about” Moby-Dick, Nicholas Russell describes a visit to the Met to see the operatic adaption of Herman Melville’s novel.

World History Encyclopaedia: The Violent and Mysterious Death of Christopher Marlowe – In his recent article on the influential Elizabethan playwright, poet and translator Christopher Marlowe, Harrison W. Mark writes: On “30 May 1593, the sounds of a heated argument could be heard emanating from a boarding house in Deptford.” The disagreement escalated and a dagger was drawn, leading to the death of a “literary genius”. The question he asks is, why?

Jacobin: Between the Lines Is a Prescient Homage to Print Media – “Released almost 50 years ago, Joan Micklin Silver’s touching film about the decline of print media, Between the Lines, is a love letter to news and the people who make it”, says Soham Gadre.

The Johannesburg Review of Books: ‘An incisive portrait of a society grappling with change’—Jennifer Malec reviews Iris Mwanza’s debut novel The Lions’ Den – “The Lions’ Den by Iris Mwanza is a historical thriller that reaches into many different corners of its characters’ lives,” writes Jennifer Malec of this tale of a young male dancer “arrested after being caught in an act of sexual misconduct with another man.” A “crime ‘against the order of nature’, according to Zambian law.”

Press Gazette: ‘The opposite of what Hitler would do’ on better paper: Observer relaunched by Tortoise – Dominic Ponsford reports: “James Harding says Observer will be independent, liberal and internationalist under Tortoise.”

Pioneer Works: I’d Like to Report a Murder – “Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor talk to hannah baer about the dark art of literary takedowns.”

Something Eve Read: The Greatest Literary Mystery of ALL TIME – Eve Matheson with a light-hearted review of Elizabeth Winkler’s “delightfully entertaining”, if ‘blasphemous’, work of literary detection, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature.

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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: #ReadingtheMeow2025, 20 Books of Summer, 20 Books of Summer 2025, Anna James, Cat Literature, Drew Harvell, Laura Spinney, Marìlia Arnaud, May Sarton, Miguel de Cervantes, Olaf Stapledon, Reading the Meow 2025, Suleika Jaouad, Tierno Monénembo, Wordsmith Day, World Press Freedom Day