An end of week recap

“The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
– Tennessee Williams

A little late in the day but this week’s wind up is finally out. I’ve been gallivanting around Liverpool again and didn’t get home until this evening. Many sorries for the delay.

Among the myriad bookish birthdays occurring today are German dramatist and novelist, Gerhart Hauptmann (1862), English poet Charlotte Mew (1869), American modernist poet, Marianne Moore (1887), English writer, Richmal Crompton (1890), Italian journalist and avant-garde writer, Giorgio Manganelli (1922), English novelist and short-story writer, J. G. Ballard (1930) and Australian author, Liane Moriarty (1966). Likewise, on Sunday, we can remember Chinese author and poet, Guo Moruo (1892), Lithuanian poet and playwright, Kazys Binkis (1893), Bulgarian writer, Michael Arlen (1895), Australian novelist, playwright and essayist, Joan Lindsay (1896), Portuguese writer, José Saramago (1922), Nigerian novelist and poet, Chinua Achebe (1930) and Norwegian author, lawyer and former Minister of Justice, Anne Holt (1958).

Primarily celebrated in the USA (but catching on elsewhere through online communities and global writing initiatives), I Love to Write Day exists to inspire people of all ages to articulate themselves through writing. The Day of the Imprisoned Writer, however, is observed internationally to remember writers persecuted, imprisoned or silenced for expressing their ideas through words, with participation from PEN Centres and literary communities across more than 100 countries. Both events take place today. Tomorrow is Icelandic Language Day, a vibrant tribute to Iceland’s language and its deep cultural roots.

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.

* The Moomins and the Missing Links *

I have been promising this feature for at least the last six years… Many apologies if you’ve been holding your breaths! As part of my ongoing Tove Trove project, I have collated a selection of links to noteworthy Tovian websites, articles, artworks and other related English-language information resources. Please keep popping back because the list is going to grow. >> Peruse: TOVE TRUFFLING: A Collection of Tovian Links >> 

* Beat the Brobdingnagian Book Bulge! *

You may recall mention in WUTW #425 of a possible end-of-year literary happening in the offing. Well, it is a prospect no more, having become a very definite, big, fat certainty if you are up for a substantial challenge to see out 2025. It is, of course, Doorstoppers in December – the ultimate behemoth of book challenges – and it begins on the first day of the month, with just a brief break for Christmas before wrapping up “in late December/early January.” Your hostess with the mostest (chapters? words perhaps?) is Dr. Laura Tisdall and she is keen to reignite interest in good old-fashioned chunksters of 350-pages or more (though, she would prefer 500 to 600-pages plus). So, while you limber up for the event, I suggest you weigh up Doorstoppers in December! for all you need to know about taking part. Laura will shortly be posting something about her own reading intentions in addition to looking back at “favourite doorstoppers of the past”. She would be delighted to receive your comments and discover your plans. Please don’t miss out. It’s going to be a beastathon! 💪

* Blogs from the Basement * 

Liberated from the cobwebs and brought back into the daylight: (1) Last July, British blogger Lizzie of Promoting Crime Fiction wrote a positive review of Tim Sullivan’s latest thriller, The Bookseller – the tale of a dead body discovered in an “upmarket antiquarian bookshop in the leafier area of Bristol”, which can mean only one thing: a fresh case for neurodiverse DS George Cross. In this “fast-moving police procedural with an outstandingly drawn detective”, there is, she says, “a good cast of suspicious characters” and a satisfying “sleight-of-hand ending.” Head over to ‘The Bookseller’ by Tim Sullivan to find out why Lizzie describes it as having a “real feel of a police investigation”. (2) Describing it as a “taut novella [which] opens in 1945”, Joseph Schreiber’s review for roughghosts last November of the four fragmentary stories that make up Celebration by Croatian writer Damir Karakaš was summed up as an “intensely detailed, yet spare, text” that could be “easily read in an afternoon”. Discover what else Joseph has to say about this “slender” but “powerful” book in his post, On through the dark forest: Celebration by Damir Karakaš. 

* 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 Observer: Paperback of the week: Dog Days by Emily LaBarge – Part memoir, part essay, part cultural criticism cum literary experiment, Canadian writer Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days is a “fascinating study of the trauma narrative drawing on a real-life encounter with armed thieves”, says Chris Power.

The Joy of Old Books: Middlebrow, Middle-Class, Midlands and Middle-Aged: the Vindication of Dorothy Whipple – Virago Press founder Carmen Calil once caustically remarked: “We had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink.” This best-selling English author’s “prose and content”, she continued, “absolutely defeated” her. Harriet finds it “hard to see why her novels were so hated by the Virago team” and explores why “this much-loved writer [became] a by-word for mediocrity?”

The New York Times: The Essential Kate Atkinson – “Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone”, finds Sadie Stein. 

Moonbow: What Even Is Children’s Literature Criticism & Why Is It Important? – Writer and creative director, Taylor Sterling, with “a brief history, some definitions, and [an explanation as to] why [she does] this crazy work!”

Bookanista: Memoir, social history and more – Nicholas Blincoe’s Oliver Twist & Me: The True Story of My Family and Charles Dickens’s Best-Loved Novel “stands apart” from other Dickens biographies by “intertwining literary history with a personal journey”, finds Georgia de Chamberet.

Asian Review of Books: “Half Light” by Mahesh Rao Half Light, Mahesh Rao – “Although Half Light takes place on the cusp of India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality, Mahesh Rao uses this historic transition not as a centrepiece but as a lens to investigate the quieter dramas and private reckonings of those in the shadows of moments of social transformation”, writes Shehrazade Zafar-Arif.

Asterisk Magazine: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse? – Celine Nguyen suggests the “decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating.” Here she poses the question: “How can we bring it back?”

A Reading Life: A long book gathers the pieces. – December will be “one big book, approached without haste.” And as if by magic, Petya K. Grady has written the perfect piece for those considering Doorstoppers in December!

The Literary Edit: I like big books and I cannot lie – Yes, another one for all you big-bookers. Lucy Pearson suggests “fourteen door-stop tomes worth your time”.

Caught by the River: Edging Closer to the Sea – An extract from the introduction to Christina Riley’s Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves, in which she “finds in beach detritus the fragments of stories waiting to be told.” 

EL PAÍS: Margaret Atwood: ‘Older women are only allowed to be two things: wise old women or wicked old witches’ – “In a conversation from Toronto, the author — who has released her long-awaited memoirs — reflects on Trump, the enduring power of The Handmaid’s Tale, Canadian literature, and mortality”.

Asymptote: Baptism by Fire: An Interview with Mayada Ibrahim on Arabophone Africa in Translation – “I’m interested in Black subjectivity, in works that challenge and problematise the hegemony of Arabic…”, Mayada Ibrahim tells Alton Melvar M Dapanas in an interview during which she discusses translating Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s historical novel, Samahani.

Womack’s Wanderings: On reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading [Essay] – English children’s author, Philip Womack, tries to understand what it means to read a book.

The Atlantic: All Our Brilliant Friends – “The explosion of novels about intense female friendships, in the Elena Ferrante mold, is changing the genre—and making it more fun.” Lily Meyer reviews L.A. Women, Ella Berman’s historical novel about a complicated friendship between two ambitious and talented female writers in 1960s Los Angeles.

The Body Collage: Nonfiction November! – In honour of Nonfiction November, bookseller Katie Vasquez shares a selection of non-fiction titles about nature and the body.

Australian Arts Review: William J. Byrne: The Warrumbar – “Inspired by the many tales shared by his father, uncle and aunties, William J. Byrne has written his debut novel, The Warrumbar, a fictional story influenced by his family’s struggles and resilience, and the lasting impact of history and circumstance.”

The i Paper: I’m a Pussy Riot activist. This is what life is like in a Russian prison – “Maria Alyokhina reveals the conditions she endured in one of the remote penal colonies where opponents of Vladimir Putin face potential torture”. In Political Girl, her new memoir of protest and punishment, she uses “her own story to expose conditions for those who dare to oppose Putin”.

Methinks: “All Glory Ends In Night”: the doomed resistance of Beowulf – “The unknown author of Beowulf lamented the erasure of a glorious past, but we’re still reading about his heroes (and learning from them)”. Julia Sampaio revisits J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Monsters and the Critics, an examination of the poetic nature of this Anglo-Saxon epic, which she describes as “one of the finest pieces of literary criticism I’ve ever read”.

The Marginalian: Words: Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Language – “I know of no greater love letter to language, to its simple pleasures and its infinite complexities, than the one [Chilean poet and Nobel Prize-winner] Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) tucks into his posthumously published Memoirs […] under the heading ‘Words’”, writes Maria Popova.

Feasts and Festivals: Desert Island Discs – the books. – Which one book have the many fascinating guests (or ‘castaways’) on the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme] Desert Island Discs chosen to take with them – and what might that say about them? wonders Liz Gwedhan.

American Libraries: 2025 Library Design Showcase – Phil Morehart with a guide to the “year’s most impressive new and renovated libraries” in North America.

The Irish Times: I’m always surprised at the whiff of condescension that greets historical novels – “Historical fiction is a broad church, spanning detective fiction, romance, family sagas, war stories, feminist polemics, political thrillers and more”, says poet and fiction writer Liz McSkeane – the author (most recently) of Aftershock.

intellectual rigor mortis: When a Book is Like a Tapestry (The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk) – Laurel Clayton describes Poland’s Nobel-winning writer, activist and public intellectual, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft) as “a really long, really ambitious book with profound bias, authorial reverence, and personal stakes”.

Equator: Boyhood – Yuri Slezkine, author most recently of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, shares what he “learnt from the Soviet Adventure Library”.

Good Reading: Vanished Voices – Peter Hodge writes: “Charmian Clift’s recently reissued novel Honour’s Mimic (first published 1964) is such a compelling work of literature that one wonders how it and so many other great Australian and International books could ever have gone ‘out of print’.”

Notes from a Small Press: How do you find books to read? – “Recommendations for recommendations” – A handy little guide from Anne Trubek about finding your next read.

BBC News: British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka dies – Gina Bolton reports: “British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka, best known for her 2005 novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has died aged 79.”

A Narrative Of Their Own: Subverting The Female Bildungsroman – In her ongoing investigation into the lives and literature of women, Kate Jones this week homes in on Jean Rhys’s 1934 coming-of-age novel, Voyage in the Dark.

Chicago Review of Books: My Teacher Was a Little Strange in “The Bridegroom Was a Dog” by Yoko Tawada – Mia Rhee on “the reissued 1998 classic novella The Bridegroom Was A Dog by Yoko Tawada”, a magical realism story of a romance developing between a Japanese schoolteacher and a doglike man (translated by Margaret Mitsutani).

Pens and Poison: Leave Literature Alone – Liza Libes “on literature’s political entanglement” and a request to “renew our allegiance to the humanistic tradition”.

Ancillary Review of Books: Unscientific Flights of Fancy: Review of Kate Holterhoff’s Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859–1914 – Gareth A. Reeves looks at Kate Holterhoff’s Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, in which she explores the interplay between British science and romance fiction from a Darwinian perspective.

Historia: Why do we tell stories? Finding Cordelia – “While writing her latest book, [Daughter of the Stones,] a reimagining of the story of Cordelia, Alexandra Walsh was struck by the way some figures reappear in different tales through the ages. Why, she wondered, do we tell and retell these stories? So she set about finding Cordelia.”

The Ink-Stained Desk: The Literary History of the Haunted House. – “Thematic Essays” – “In an attempt to stretch out Halloween celebrations for just one more week, [C M Reid dedicated] this post to one of [her] favourite horror tropes: The Haunted House!”

Asterism: A Talk with Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper, Cofounders of Quite Literally Books – With the coming of the “second batch of Quite Literally Books”, Asterism celebrates by reaching out to the co-founders, “Bremond and Lisa to discuss the friendship that started it all and the inspiration behind starting their own publishing company.”

Jonathan Crain: Steven Kaplan Reframes Ethiopia’s Ancient Past in “The Ethiopians” – American historian, “Steven Kaplan’s The Ethiopians: Lost Civilizations offers a concise yet considered examination of one of Africa’s most enduring and complex civilizations”, says Jonathan. Indeed, the author “achieves a balance of scholarly precision and readability”, and this work “reminds us that civilizations are not ‘lost’ so much as continually reimagined”.

Stylist: Who are the mystery authors behind The Ending Writes Itself? – Six authors. One private island. Seventy-two hours to write the ending. The Ending Writes Itself “is a locked-room mystery novel, and every book lover is talking about it”, says Sarah Best. “Here’s everything we know so far…”

On the Seawall: on The Pelican Child, stories by Joy Williams – Mike Jeffrey reviews Joy Williams’ short story collection, The Pelican Child, every one of which he describes as “like wine, […] that rich blend [of] mystical terror combined with descriptive clarity and strange humor, and all those sparkling sentences.”

The Seaboard Review of Books: The Last of Its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert, translated by Aleshia Jensen – Canadian freelance writer Lisa Timpf reviews The Last of Its Kind (translated by Aleshia Jensen), “a work of historical fiction” beginning in 1835 from the award-winning French writer Sibylle Grimbert about the bloody massacre of a colony of great auks – a bird that is now tragically extinct. Lisa describes it as “a timely and poignant reminder that what seems to be unthinkable may in fact be all too real”.

Reactor: The Accidental Completionist – Molly Templeton “started to notice, in the last few years, how much [she] liked knowing an author’s entire oeuvre.” Her advice to others? “Gotta catch ’em all” – by which she means, “all the books by any given author”.

The Dispatch: Men’s Adventure Fiction is Back – “A massive—no, really, massive—new novel is a horse-filled epic worth reading”, says Nadya Williams in her review of Tom’s Crossing, Mark Z. Danielewski’s page-turning mystery set in the American West.

The Novel Tea: Addressing H.P. Lovecraft: Reclaiming Cosmic Horror from the Colonial Gaze – “How do we engage with the legacy of problematic authors?” This week, Shruti Koti and Neha Ambati discuss the possible prejudices of American writer of weird, horror, fantasy and science fiction, H.P. Lovecraft.

GQ: How fashion embraced the book nerds – “From Miu Miu to Valentino to Saint Laurent, fashion houses are falling over themselves to cosy up to literature. Meanwhile, an edgy live reading scene is taking over London nightlife. Is reading fiction really cooler than ever? Or is it all just another performative fad?” asks Josiah Gogarty.

Mental Floss: Why You Should Be Extra-Illustrating Your Books – “If you’re crafty and love learning,” Marla Mackoul thinks “this all-but-forgotten old-timey hobby may be for you.”

The Booktender: The First Novel That Could Have Been an Email – “Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff might be the first major novel that could have been an email”, and it “breaks every convention to make its point about the compromises and luck traditional publishing requires.” You can also read a less than enthusiastic review by Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

Anne of Carversville: Feeling the Love for Moomins with Suvi Koponen in Vogue Scandinavia October-November 2025 🎩👜 – The latest issue of Vogue Scandinavia celebrates 80 years of the Moomins, with Finnish supermodel Suvi Riggs Koponen journeying home to Moominworld for a tribute to Tove Jansson’s enduring universe and the beloved characters of her childhood.

Tom Cox: What Will Life Really Be Like After The Internet Gets Incinerated? – British author Tom Cox, loved by his fans for writing on such themes as folklore, rambling, wildlife, psychedelic rock, cat ownership, local history and golf, explains in this amusing piece the thinking behind his ‘Map Of Britain After The Great 2029 Technology Crash’.

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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.

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

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #ToveTrove, Christina Riley, Damir Karakaš, Day of the Imprisoned Writer, Doorstoppers in December, Emily LaBarge, Jean Rhys, Joy Williams, Moomin, November Reading, Pablo Neruda, Tennessee Williams, Tim Sullivan, Tove Trove