An end of week recap
“Blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be a source of delight.”
– John Ruskin
On the birthday front we have (among many others too numerous to mention) Irish novelist, Bram Stoker (1847), Macedonian poet, writer, journalist and lexicographer, Dimitrija Cupovski (1878), American novelist and journalist, Margaret Mitchell (1900), American novelist, travel writer and one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century, Martha Gellhorn (1908), English children’s writer, Monica Edwards (1912) and Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro (1954). Tomorrow is the turn of Russian literary all-rounder, Ivan Turgenev (1818), French writer and a pioneer of detective fiction, Émile Gaboriau (1832), Bulgarian writer, Yordan Yovkov (1880), Spanish-born Paraguayan poet, Josefina Plá (1903), American poet, Anne Sexton (1928), Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, Imre Kertész (1929), Liverpool poet, Roger McGough (1937), Australian crime fiction writer, Michael Robotham (1960) and Iranian-American author, Tahereh Mafi (1988).
As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on the 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 Streetwise in December *
* Blogs from the Basement *
* 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 week or so:
* 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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Scroll.in: Short fiction: An elderly Vir runs into a rebel who fought against the East India Company in India – “An excerpt from ‘Amidst the Deodars’ in Refuge: Stories of War (and Love), by [Indian author] Sunny Singh.”
The Asian Age: Book Review | Hope in the Time of Bloodshed & Strife – “The title story ‘Refuge’ is a searing tale of a young couple, Abid and Nur, trying to survive the horror of the Syrian civil war”.
Latin American Review of Books: Blurred visions – “If ever we wanted to demonstrate the power of an idea to shape the physical world, we need look no further than Nicaragua’s dream of building an interoceanic canal.” Here, Gavin O’Toole reviews Canal Dreamers, Jessica M Lepler’s history of the ways in which the “quest to link oceans has driven Central America to distraction.” A definite possibility for Nonfiction November.
The New York Times: For a Literary Saint, Margaret Atwood Can Sure Hold a Grudge – “She had to be pushed to write her new memoir, Book of Lives. The result reveals the experiences (and a few slights) that have shaped her work”, says Alexandra Alter in a piece perfectly timed for Margaret Atwood Reading Month.
Asterism: The Pleasures of Being No One: On Anonymous Literature – “There are countless reasons why an author might choose to publish work anonymously (or more commonly, under a pseudonym)”, says the anonymous writer of this article. S/he “thought it might be fun to take a look at some books by and about real nobodies.”
Miller’s Book Review: Bookish Diversions: The Bits We Usually Ignore – This time, it’s all about “dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes—and how [this author] handled them in [his] new book[-about-books], The Idea Machine”. Another highly entertaining article from Joel J Miller!
Literary Review: Restless Soul – “Few writers have been so eagerly mythologised as Katherine Mansfield. The short, brilliant life, the doomed love affairs, the sickly genius have together blurred the woman behind the work. Yet her stories, with their quicksilver shifts of tone and feeling, betray a frenetic mind.” Sophie Oliver on Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life by Gerri Kimber.
1000 Libraries: The 26 Best Bookstores in Australia – “Australia’s literary landscape is one that flourishes through sharp wit and multicultural influences, making for a slew of bookstores and literary hotspots like no other.”
Gutter: Fishing in Moominland 🎩👜 – An essay from Dan Richards (author most recently of Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark) about his working trip to Finland to write a piece for The Economist about the “Baltic archipelago of Pellinge, a place synonymous with writer and artist Tove Jansson.”
Two in one for Janeites:
NPR: ‘Patchwork’ pieces together Jane Austen’s personal life – Tahneer Oksman writes: “While some might be bothered by a biography that regularly, and proudly, takes liberties with facts and chronology, such artistry is the heart and strength of [Patchwork,] Kate Evans’ delightful and illuminating work.”
Bookish: “My dear Charlotte—impossible!” – “Rachel Parris on what happened after Charlotte Lucas married Mr Collins…” Natasha Poliszczuk feels this historical novel, Introducing Mrs. Collins “captures the spirit of Austen”.
The Lagos Review: When Three Worlds Collide: A Review of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft – Olukorede S. Yishau – “Africa’s most recent Nobel laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, returns with another powerful work, Theft”, in which he “probes the intersections of memory, belonging, and displacement in a rapidly changing world.”
The Monthly: A complete write-off – “What happens when writers put down their pens, or don’t, or can’t?” asks Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Knowledge Lust: 9 Techniques to Make Reading Classic Novels More Enjoyable – Sam Rinko suggests ways of “developing the right mindset for literary self-study”.
The Asahi Shimbun: VOX POPULI: Notes in the margins of old books a glimpse of other stories – The Japanese expression ‘Kizumono’ translates as ‘damaged goods’, and when uttered by second-hand book dealers, “denotes pre-owned books that are marked with underlines or notes written in the margins.”
Liberties: The Last Reader: A Fantasia for Cynthia Ozick – “Ozick’s archive is exceptionally large: 330 boxes, 176 dedicated to correspondence alone”, says writer and researcher Charlie Tyson in this piece about Cynthia Ozick, the American short story writer, novelist and essayist – whom, he says, “may be among the last voices for whom literature is everything.”
Words Without Borders: The National Book Award Interviews: Jazmina Barrera and Christina MacSweeney – “Author Jazmina Barrera and translator Christina MacSweeney discuss The Queen of Swords [the biography of Mexican author and pioneer of the Magical Realism movement, Elena Garro], longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature.”
The Critic: Murders for November – “Time to snuggle up with the best of crime fiction”, says Jeremy Black.
A Reading Life: The books that risk losing us – “Lydia Davis on why she writes, on being ‘grabbed and bothered’ and the tedious writing that threatens to lose us and yet we can’t let it go.” Petya K. Grady enjoys delving Into the Weeds.
Tap Water Sommelier: The Great Russian Novel – According to Konstantin Asimonov: “The Beast is obese, odious, enormous, a-hundred-maws, and barking.”
The Sewanee Review: Marginalia: Charles D’Ambrosio – In this regular feature, a writer is asked to introduce one of their favourite works of literature “by way of a short piece of prose.” On this occasion, Taryn Bowe “considers a story from The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio.”
The Culture Dump: Coffee House Culture – Dr. Rebecca Marks discusses the “ambience of cosiness, creativity, and hustle which attracts us to coffee shops” and why she thinks we get some of our “best ideas” in them.
Two pieces relating to the Clanchy situation:
BBC News: Publisher apologises to author Kate Clanchy four years after book controversy – Pan Macmillan has apologised to prize-winning author Kate Clanchy after what it describes as “a regrettable series of events” over her teaching memoir, Some Kids I Taught & What They Taught Me, reports Katie Razzall.
Julie Bindel’s Writing and Podcasts: An Open Letter to the Society of Authors re. Joanne Harris – Julie Bindel writes: “In light of the apology to Kate Clanchy from former publishers, & the rehash of the sadistic behaviour of Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh, & Chimene Suleyman, here is a reminder of the way the SoA [Society of Authors] behaved” (signed by writers, screenwriters, playwrights and others working in the publishing industry in various capacities).
Big Think: The world’s largest library of lies has good news about fake news – “In 2011, Johns Hopkins acquired the Bibliotheca Fictiva — the world’s largest collection of literary forgeries — to study how fabricated texts have shaped history.” It would seem, “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing.”
O Vietnam: A View From Inside: The overlooked legacy of French literature – “Vietnamese literature in French, although written in a foreign language, is an inseparable part of Vietnamese literature as a whole.”
Spike Art Magazine: An Excerpt from Joanna Walsh’s “Amateurs” – “In her new philosophical history of the internet [Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters], Spike’s contributor and former columnist examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.”
Country Life: ‘So many of us look at the world through our screens and forget to pay attention to the world outside’: Katy Hessel on the world’s great female artists, why free entry to museums matters and her consuming passions – The British writer, historian, curator and broadcaster Katy Hessel speaks to Lotte Brundle about the dangers of AI, how she fell in love with the art world […,] why it’s okay that her favourite painting is by a male artist” and her new book, How To Live An Artful Life: 366 Inspirations from Artists on how to Bring Creativity to Your Everyday.
Fiction Matters: Reading in Public No. 88: Maintaining reading satisfaction through the year-end hullabaloo – Sara Hildreth talks “mental shifts and reading tricks for avoiding the annual overwhelm”.
Aeon: A poet on Mars – “Could autism explain Virginia Woolf’s unique voice? Her extraordinary eye for detail and connections suggests it might”, says Camille Caprioglio.
4Colums: Vaim – “Wateryworld: language and its faults make for a story of amphibolous feelings in the inaugural installment of Jon Fosse’s new trilogy set in a small fishing town.” Ania Szremski on Vaim, the Norwegian Nobel Laureate’s new novella.
BookBrunch: “There is no reading crisis at food banks – we see a huge appetite for books” – Emily Rhodes, founder of Bookbanks – “Bookbanks is one of those concepts which is so simple yet so brilliant, you wonder why it hasn’t been done before,” says reader, writer and professional bookworm, Natasha Poliszczuk.
Air Mail: There’s Something About Julie – “How Walt Disney and the Sherman brothers landed on Julie Andrews for the role of Mary Poppins—without whom ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ would not exist”. An excerpt from Todd James Pierce’s Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of a Classic Film.
AP: Australia’s Helen Garner wins Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize for her ‘addictive’ diaries – In How to End a Story, Australian writer Helen Garner charts twenty years of her life, from publishing her debut novel in the 1970s to the collapse of her marriage in the 1990s.
Deadline: New Harry Potter Audiobook Launches On Audible With Bosses Targeting Billions Of Listening Hours – “Audible says its Harry Potter launch will usher in a new era in audiobooks and has backed its adaptations to surpass the whopping 1.8 billion hours of listening notched by previous audio versions of J.K. Rowling’s much-loved books.”
The Daily Star: A prayer for Mauritius – Israr Hasan reviews Portrait of an Island of Fire, a collection of essays by Ariel Saramandi, which shape an account of the island country of Mauritius at a critical moment in its history.
The Latino Newsletter: The Uncomfortable Truth About U.S. Publishing’s Language Divide – “Spanish-language and English-language literary ecosystems still barely speak to each other — and that needs to change”, argues Javier Marin. He calls for a “bilingual renaissance.”
Snack: Francine Toon speaks about her new novel ‘Bluff’, distance and seeing Scotland through a more gothic lens, and the unreliability of memory (Interview) – Emily Henderson writes: “Scottish writer Francine Toon’s second novel, Bluff, is set in the fictional Fife town of St Rule, inspired by St Andrews. This atmospheric new thriller blends the tension of a mystery with the chill of a modern gothic, moving between the narratives and timelines of characters Joanie and Cameron.”
Advocating for the Ignorant: Rose, I never knew you – Sarah Harkness on the English writer Rose Macaulay’s 1956 novel, The Towers of Trebizond.
Pittsburgh Review of Books: The Afterlives of Oliver Sacks – “For all the public iterations of Oliver’s afterlife, I find my own experience of his to be particular and private”, writes Peter Catapano.
Feasts and Festivals: Bugles from sad shires… – The poem “Adelstrop was inspired by a train journey that Edward Thomas took from Paddington to Malvern on Midsummer Day, June 24th 1914. Less than three years later he was dead; shot through the chest at Arras on the Western Front. He was 39.” Liz Gwedhan shares her thoughts on this much anthologised poem.
Interview: John Tottenham on His Debut Novel Service, an Ode to Bookstores and Bohemians – Chris Molnar talks to John Tottenham about the background to his nihilistic novel, Service, about a bookseller who cannot abide the customers and seethes with anger and frustration over his own unfinished novel. You can read reviews of his book at Maudlin House and Zona Motel.
The Post and Courier: Review: New memoir, ‘Cipher,’ grapples with secrets discovered in 150-year-old encoded journals – In the 1800s, William Prestwood, a South Carolinian farmer, kept salacious coded diaries. Fifty years ago, the “small hand-stitched notebooks” were discovered “outside a house set for demolition”. Now translated, they have been published under the title of Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries by Jeremy B. Jones.
Jane Austen Literacy Foundation: Issue 127: A Peaceful Presence–Examining Haunted Happenings at Chawton House – “Editor of Pride & Possibilities, and highly superstitious individual, Mindy Killgrove-Harris, explores the spooky stories and spectral sightings in and around Chawton House and Cottage.”
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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.
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