An end of week recap

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
– Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

A very good morning to everyone – and an equally hearty good evening to those residing in the south!

Among today’s literary birthdays are American-born British essayist and critic, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865), Japanese essayist and philosopher, D. T. Suzuki (1870), American playwright and poet, Ntozake Shange (1948), African-American novelist, Terry McMillan (1951), British science fiction and fantasy writer, Charles Stross (1964), American novelist and short story writer, Rick Moody (1961) and bestselling Indian author, Amish Tripathi (1974). On Sunday, we can blow up the balloons for English poet and essayist, Leigh Hunt (1784), Lithuanian writer, poet, novelist, playwright and philologist, Vincas Kreve-Mickevicius (1882), Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright and journalist, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899), British author, John le Carré (1931), American author, journalist and film critic, Renata Adler (1937, some say 1938), English writer, Philip Pullman (1946) and Tanzanian-born writer Mark Behr (1963).

Sadly, the prolific Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist and Anglican cleric, Jonathan Swift, died on 19^th October 1745. However, on a happier note, starting today in the USA is National Friends of Libraries Week, an annual event honouring the volunteers, donors and advocates who support public libraries across the country.

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.

I have no wish to frighten the horses… as the celebrated Edwardian actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell might once have said, but we are getting perilously close to that time of year, so this week, I have not one but two forthcoming reading challenges to announce:

* Twenty-five Reasons to Celebrate a Century *

We all know it’s coming. In fact, it is almost here… but on this occasion it will be a little bit special. Thus, when Karen and Simon’s Club celebrations kick-off on 20^th October, you should expect to hear the sound of corks popping, attend a string of elegant literary gatherings in the company of other bookish-types (cocktails served upon arrival) and gasp in admiration as your hosts entertain you with their own uniquely spirited interpretation of the Charleston. Then, as the gramophone crackles in the background, much lively chatter will ensue on topics such as the latest Woolf and Wodehouse, Huxley and Hemingway. Consider this your official invitation. RSVP before next Monday. Prepare to party like it’s 1925!

* Yes MARM! Reading Atwood in November *

Marcie from Buried in Print, being the lovely lady she is, has made it very easy for me this year by providing grab-and-go “snips”. So, without further snipping required on my part (or any sniping come to that), here we go: “Everyone is welcome to participate in Margaret Atwood Reading Month: read something, watch something, think something. Some MARMers have a confirmed habit, returning annually. Some return as November’s busy-ness allows, casually drawing from her oeuvre when the mood strikes. Sometimes there’s a particular Atwood novel that’s intrigued a reader to sample MARM once or twice. And occasionally a reader has caught wind of MARM and decided to read Atwood for the first time.” Wheeeee! ⛷️ That felt good. Now, all that remains for me to add is, please take yourself over to Three Weeks Away: #MARM2025, check out the schedule and start jolly well MARMing like mad!

* Blogs from the Basement *

Brought back into the light this week: (1) Barely straying into neglected territory is Judith McKinnon’s August review of Fonseca, Jessica Francis Kane’s novelistic take on a very real period in English author Penelope Fitzgerald’s life when “she and her husband Desmond were living beyond their means,” which led to her setting off for northern Mexico in pursuit of a legacy. See Book Review: Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane – a novel of Penelope Fitzgerald’s sojourn in Mexica to discover Judith’s thoughts on this book. (2) Last March, Kate Jackson of Cross Examining Crime reviewed Ray B. Browne’s scholarly exploration of one of Australia’s most distinctive crime writers in her post, The Spirit of Australia: The Crime Fiction of Arthur W. Upfield (1988) by Ray B. Browne. Here she delves into each chapter of The Spirit of Australia, picking up on the strengths and weaknesses of this literary critique, concluding she may usefully “dip back into [it] in the future” but is unlikely to “read [it] from cover to cover again.” (3) I couldn’t fail to notice the title (and cover) of Mike Stark’s Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird, “a well-researched compilation of historical wonder and hatred” connected with this unfairly maligned bird, reviewed by Celeste of A Literary Escape. In her post, Starlings by Mike Stark, she tells us the book “is a nice repository for lots of historical information”, though it is likely aimed at “avid” rather than “casual” birders.

* Lit Crit Blogflash * 

This is where I share my favourite pieces of writing from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented people producing high-quality book features and reviews, which makes it mighty difficult to pick only one – in this case, posted in the last couple of weeks:

Zoran Živković: Fables of a Lost World – When S.C. Hickman isn’t producing fascinating book reviews for his blog, The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts, he is a “poet, short story author, and philosophical speculator of the real within which we all live and have our being.” In his recent post on the Serbian writer Zoran Živković, whom he describes as “one of the major figures in post-Yugoslav speculative and philosophical fiction”, who “matters because he’s one of the few European fabulists to construct a coherent metaphysical universe across novels and mosaics of linked tales”, he discusses his body of work in addition to specific titles from his remarkable canon. Hickman tells us Živković’s “archive doesn’t burn; it glows.”

* 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: 

**************************** 

The Observer: Gilbert White’s world of wonder – A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer by British biographer, historian, critic and publisher, Jenny Uglow, is an “account of a year in the life of an 18th-century curate and his garden”, which, says Philip Hoare, “is a glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.” 

From My Bookshelf: Happy Endings – Peter C. Meilaender has recently discovered the work of Austrian-born British writer Eva Ibbotson (1925-2010). Here he reflects on her short fiction collection, A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories, describing her tales as “quite charming—small romantic comedies in which love triumphs over obstacles in a disarmingly angst-free manner.”

BookTrib.: Sarah Landenwich Weaves Music, Mystery, and Memory in “The Fire Concerto” – In this review, Linda Hitchcock describes American author Sarah Landenwich’s debut novel, The Fire Concerto as “an extraordinary work of fiction, filled with grace and eloquence revolving around the emotional lyricism of the 19^th century Romantic music period.”

Miller’s Book Review: We’ve Been Reading ‘Dracula’ Wrong: The Gospel According to Mina Harker – Dracula, Bram Stoker’s classic gothic horror novel of 1897, “dramatizes profound human tensions” and, according Joel J Miller, the “true hero” of the story is Mina Harker – exposing as she does man’s “soul torn between vengeance and mercy.”

Mumbai Mirror: How India was drawn – Deepti Anand’s India Through Iconic Maps is “a stunning new book [gathering] 254 antique maps that reveal how India was charted and imagined over eight centuries.”

A Reading Life: The real reasons why you are not reading – Petya Grady on “exhaustion, wrong books, and finding your way back.”

The Conversation: Jane Austen and theory of mind: how literary fiction sharpens your ‘mindreading’ skills – Carmen Barajas and Noelia López-Montilla examine Jane Austen’s interconnected webs of thought and feeling in order to help the reader.

3 Quarks Daily: AI before AI: Prehistory of Artificial Minds – “From Homer’s golden servants to al-Jazari’s drummers, from the Zairja to Llull’s combinatorial wheels, from karakuri dolls to Shelley’s monster, humans have long tested the boundary between the natural and the artificial”, says Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad in his piece looking at the part literature has played in exploring the consequences of artificial beings.

Monique’s Substack: First and Last Published Words: Ruth Park – “As researcher and writer of Ruth Park’s biography,” Monique Rooney is certain an Author’s Note from 2010 (shown in this post) contains the New Zealand-born Australian writer’s very “last written words.”

International Examiner: Sonora Jha’s ‘Intemperance’ blends romcoms, Hindu myths, and feminist musings – A middle-aged woman holds a contest based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections. Sonora Jha’s Intemperance “playfully adapts the swayamvar to 21st century,” says Nalini Iyer.

London Ukrainian Review: When Words Fail to Protect your Culture the Armed Forces Will – “Respected author, PhD in political science, combat medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine — Kateryna Zarembo’s story is not unusual. Writing from her frontline position, she elucidates why Ukrainian writers, artists, and performers interrupt successful cultural careers to join the military defence of their homeland.” (Translated by Tanya Savchynska.)

African Arguments: Publishing Autonomy, Censorship, and Endogenous Capitalism: Learning from Henry Chakava’s Legacy – “Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the ‘African Arguments’ series,” says Stephanie Kitchen. “It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the [the] books.”

Wardrobe Door: Narnia Began on Fire—Literally – “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe turns 75”.

ScreenRant: The Woman In Cabin 10 Author Praises Significant Book Change: “The Ending Is Really Different” – “The Woman in Cabin 10 author Ruth Ware praises a significant book change in a new interview,” commenting that the film, starring Keira Knightley, has an ending that is “really different.”

AnOther: Andrew O’Hagan’s New Book Makes a Case for the Importance of Friendship – “As On Friendship is published, the Scottish author talks about the importance of ordinary, tangible, human intimacy – and friendships nurtured offline”.

The New York Times: How a Community of Readers Saved Their Book Festival – “With humanities funding vanishing, stories and those who protect them remain our greatest hope”, says Margaret Renkl.

Economical with Fiction: A Marchioness, a Provincial Lady and Dickens: All Going Pop: The Pawnshop and Fiction – A paragraph in the biography of Lord Salisbury led E.J. Barnes to reflect on “the pawnshop/pawnbroker, its history and [her] favourite literary frequenter of pawnshops, E.M. Delafield’s” protagonist in Diary of a Provincial Lady.

The British Columbia Review: ‘On the edge of the world’ – “What follows after an epic coastal earthquake, with a staggering body count and collapsed infrastructure?” Heidi Greco describes Canadian author, Katie Welch’s Ladder to Heaven as a “sophomore novel with magic realist elements” that explores this question “in an unconventional manner as it whips us from one timeframe to another without ever leaving us behind.”

The Asian Age: Book Review | Thinking Through the World by Night Train – Monisha Rajesh “has made a career out of train journeys, with four books on the topic”, says Kushalrani Gulab. Her latest, Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train, is particularly enjoyable for its “non-travel related observations on humans and identity politics.”

Washington Examiner: Review of ‘Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson’ by Leo Damrosch – Diane Scharper finds Storyteller, a new biography of the Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, sets out to “reilluminate [his] unique qualities in their full range and depth.”

Manchester University Press: Author Q&A: Lily Dunn – The British author, Lily Dunn, chatted to Becca Parkinson about Into Being: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform, a guide to writing a compelling and empowering memoir.

The Hudson Review: Never Stop Writing: Sylvia Plath’s Prose – “With the release of [The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath,] which includes all of Plath’s published short fiction, essays, journalism, reviews, and radio scripts, as well as unpublished work drawn from archives [and] her short prose […] arranged chronologically by genre”, devotees will be able to “track the changes between her various representations of her life”, finds Meg Schoerke.

BBC Culture: Frankenstein: Why Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old horror story is so misunderstood – “As Guillermo del Toro’s new film starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi is released, why is the message of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel still overshadowed by its success, more than two centuries on?” asks Rebecca Laurence.

The New Daily: Free falling: Love, murder and mayhem in the ‘burbs – Australian writer “Trent Dalton’s new novel Gravity Let Me Go is hitting book stores and his publisher reckons he has a superpower”, says Phil Brown.

Laura Thompson’s Substack: Anita, revisited – “Because she’s worth it”, says Laura Thompson of the much-missed English novelist, art historian and 1984 Booker-winner, Anita Brookner.

Plough: Portraits of a Mother – “When an unpublished novella by [Japanese Catholic author] Shūsaku Endō was discovered in a box of papers, it was front-page news across Japan”, says Joy Marie Clarkson. Here she reviews Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories (translated by Van C. Gessel), containing this newly discovered work and five short stories of love, grief and maternal longing.

Publishers Weekly: Laura Restrepo and the Power of Myths – “For her latest novel [Song of Ancient Lovers], Colombian author Laura Restrepo drew inspiration from the Queen of Sheba, as well as her work reporting on Yemen’s refugee crisis for Doctors Without Borders”, finds Elaine Szewczyk.

The Guardian: The great butterfly heist: how a gentleman collector stole thousands of butterflies from Australian museums – “Scientists are still unravelling the thefts of Colin Wyatt, an English adventurer, artist and naturalist who charmed the entomological community”. Here is an excerpt from The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist by Walter Marsh.

Africa Is a Country: Reading List: Olufemi Terry – “What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?” asks Olufemi Terry, whose debut novel, Wilderness of Mirrors, is published this month.

Washington Independent Review of Books: In to Denmark: At home with Karen Blixen – Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes about her visit to Rungstedlund, the Karen Blixen Museum, which tells the story of one of Denmark’s most significant authors.

The Arts Fuse: Film Review: “Orwell: 2+2=5” — Big Brother is Here – “Director Raoul Peck, like his subject George Orwell, encourages critical thinking and urges us to consider how best to resist the strengthening forces of tyranny”, says Tim Jackson.

Advocating for the Ignorant: Have you met Miss Jones? – Sarah Harkness is on a quest to find out all she can about the British writer Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (whose pen name was E.B.C. Jones) after noticing her name mentioned by a character in a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in the same breath as Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

The Public Domain Review: The Adventures and Experiences of the First Slovak Novel – “Partially banned upon publication and translated into English for the first time this year, René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences (1783–85) found new readers in the communist era thanks to its critiques of feudalism, capitalism, and the Catholic Church. Dobrota Pucherová introduces us to this hybrid work, which mixes the bildungsroman with the philosophical novel, the romance, the adventure story, the travelogue, the history book, and the orientalist fantasy.”

Slate: The Saul Bellow He Didn’t Want the World to See – “He was called ‘the greatest American author ever.’ He won the Nobel. But his greatest achievement is an elaborate attempt to launder his reputation—and hide the truth.”

JSTOR Daily: The Enduring Popularity of Harry Potter – “How has the Harry Potter series remained so beloved across decades filled with young adult and fantasy novels?” Noor Anand Chawla investigates.

The University Times: Writing Hunger – “Famine endures not only in the land or in the generations of those who lived through it, but in the way it shapes the present moment.” Lily Braumberger on “the famine in Irish literature”.

The Tyee: Jen Sookfong Lee’s New Novel Is Terrifying – “The Vancouver author’s latest work [The Hunger We Pass Down] explores intergenerational trauma and what it means to live as a racialized immigrant woman.” Harrison Mooney describes it as “a witty and beautifully written work of fiction” – but “don’t be fooled”, he cautions. This is no “beach read”, rather, “Lee’s first horror work [and it] is bloody, disgusting and brutal.”

The Korea Times: Sugar-dusted Korean bestseller ‘To the Moon’ takes off in English edition – Jang Ryu-jin and translator Sean Lin Halbert “take office fiction global” in Korean bestseller To the Moon.

Counter Craft: Shirley Jackson and the Eerie Omniscient Narrator – Lincoln Michel shares “some thoughts on the horror classic The Haunting of Hill House”, with particular focus on Jackson’s “masterful use of POV.”

News24: OBITUARY | Zoë Wicomb 1948-2025: The author who captured South Africa’s shadows and light – Shaun de Waal reports on the death of the acclaimed South African writer Zoë Wicomb, “known for her powerful stories on identity and South African life”.

Air Mail: Story of Her Life – In Joyride: A Memoir, American writer Susan Orlean recalls her early days at The New Yorker and interviewing Joan Didion.

4Columns: Big Kiss, Bye-Bye – “A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations in the latest novel by [British author] Claire-Louise Bennett”, writes Jessi Jezewska Stevens in her review of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.

BBC News: Plans to reopen Tolkien and Lewis pub approved – Ethan Gudge reports: “Plans to reopen a pub frequented by two of the 20th Century’s most well-known authors, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, have been approved.”

Gramophone: Jeneba Kanneh-Mason explores Jane Austen’s musical world in new EP – “Jeneba Kanneh-Mason is releasing a brand-new recording for solo piano titled Jane Austen’s Piano, exploring music from Austen’s time.”

Gathering Light: On conducting a parasocial relationship with a dead author – “And thoughts on the sometimes weird, contradictory feelings readers have” from Dominika.

****************************

FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see in 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.

>> See my monthly digest at the Book Jotter Journal on Substack. >>

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #1925Club, #MARM2025, 1925 Club, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Colin Wyatt, Jen Soofkong Lee, Jenny Uglow, Jessica Francis Kane, Jonathan Swift, Margaret Atwood Reading Month, Mike Stark, Monisha Rajesh, National Friends of Libraries Week, Penelope Fitzgerald, Ray B. Browne, Sonora Jha, Walter Marsh, Zoran Živković