An end of week recap

“The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.”
– Guy Davenport (born 23^rd November 1927)

This weekend marks the final two days of Book Week Scotland (17^th to 23^rd November), an annual nationwide event celebrating books, reading and storytelling.

Today’s birthdays include English novelist and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, George Eliot (1819), French author, André Gide (1869), Hungarian poet and journalist, Endre Ady (1877), Australian writer and novelist, Jon Cleary (1917) and French-Iranian graphic novelist and children’s book author, Marjane Satrapi (1969). Then, on Sunday, it is the turn of Estonian poet, Betti Alver (1906), German-speaking Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920) and American writer, Gayl Jones (1949).

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 Sun Also Rises over Kafka’s Castle *

Over at A Hot Cup of Pleasure, Neeru has announced the Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge, which will commence on 1^st January and run throughout 2026. If you would like to take part, simply read a text of your choice (novel, non-fiction, memoir, essay, play, poem, short story, etc.) “published for the first time in 1926”, and write something (lengthy or otherwise) about it on your preferred platform, ensuring you leave a link to your contribution in the comments section at #HYH26: Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge. There are plenty of big literary names from which to choose, including (but certainly not limited to) Willa Cather, Ford Madox Ford, G. K. Chesterton, Hope Mirrlees, William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Firbank, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Yasunari Kawabata, D. H. Lawrence, A. A. Milne, Georgette Heyer, T. E. Lawrence and a fair few lesser-known names too (Germán List Arzubide, anyone?). “Books must be finished before January 1, 2027 but your reviews of them can be written and submitted until January 7”, says Neeru. Finally, please be sure to use the #HYH26 tag when posting anything about the event on social media.

* Don’t Let Murdoch Slip Under the Net *

In what Kim Forrester of Reading Matters terms “a bit of a tradition,” next year she and Cathy Brown from 746 Books will once again “[band] together to do a deep dive” – this time into the backlist of Irish-British novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). They are both “really excited to be hosting this read-along”, says Cathy, and will each cover “one of her books every alternate month [before reviewing it] in the first week of that month” – meaning participants “can read along” with them, or simply pick up a Murdoch title of choice. To find out all about A Year With Iris Murdoch (which commences January 2026), please click on Introducing a Year With Iris Murdoch to grab the official graphic, peruse the reading schedule and learn more about this iconic, Booker-winning writer. Please ensure you use the #IrisMurdoch2026 hashtag when posting about the event on social media sites.

* Blogs from the Basement * 

Brought back into the spotlight this week: (1) Just a tadge over a year ago, Helen Tope reviewed Savage Theories by Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac, the tale of “an obsessive philosophy student; a young couple’s exploration of Buenos Aires’ underground scene and an anthropologist from 1917 [researching] the earliest stages of man’s evolutionary development.” You will discover why she found this novel “complicated but impressive” at “Only for the Oloixarac superfan” – Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac (translated by Roy Kesey). (2) Set in Selwyn, “a fictional wheatbelt town in South Australia”, Shining like the sun is the story of Wilf, an eighty-year-old widower “confronting the rest of his life” and trying to decide if he should return to “the island on which he grew up”, despite it now being “empty.” However, Sue T, the ‘Aussie-focused litblogger’ at Whispering Gums, says the theme of this novel is “something so fundamentally human that it could almost sound trite, except it’s not.” You might like to find out what she means by this at Stephen Orr, Shining like the sun (#BookReview). 

* 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 few weeks:

‘Beasts of the Sea’ by Iida Turpeinen (Review) – Spanning three centuries, Finnish writer and scholar, Iida Turpeinen’s historical novel, Beasts of the Sea (translated by David Hackston), “begins in 1741, [when] naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller [boards] a Russian ship [to take part in] a mission to chart a passage to the Americas.” It is an “arduous journey [that] does eventually bear fruit” but on the return voyage, “many […] sailors die of scurvy [and] the leaky ship [is forced to drop anchor off] a deserted island”. In his superb review of this seafaring adventure story, Tony Malone of Tony’s Reading List tells us that “what seems like a disaster [for Steller] is actually a godsend” as “the island’s remote location means the wildlife is unfazed by humans”, and the captain and crew make a unique discovery: “a hitherto unknown species, a sea cow”. While the “nature of the novel means that there’s no overarching plot as such”, Tony was nevertheless “happy to spend some time” with this tale of “the marvels of the natural world and of the destruction we’ve wrought on it”.

* 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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BookPage: The Ferryman and His Wife – “Frode Grytten’s exquisitely crafted The Ferryman and His Wife follows a man joined by the souls of the people he’s ferried on his last day on earth” says Alice Cary. You may also enjoy the author’s recent piece on Literary Hub: Open Your Mouth and Sing: Frode Grytten on Becoming a Writer and Growing Up in Norway. 

BBC Hereford & Worcester: Unearthing Middle Earth and Narnia’s inspiration – “An area of Worcestershire has been credited as being the partial inspiration for two globally renowned fantasy worlds that are as much loved on paper as they are on screen”, finds Bethany Gwilliam.

ZYZZYVA: Beyond the Grasp of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s ‘Exophony’ – Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) is “Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada’s first essay collection available in English [exploring her] lifelong fascination with language, foreignness, and, more generally, “exophony”.

Wolfish!: Destined to fail: the global bestseller clogged with Victorian poetry – “It is always heartening to read of those global bestsellers that, prior to publication, seemed destined to fail”, says Australian reader, writer, tea drinker and brassica fancier, Tash. For, in the case of A.S. Byatt’s 1990 magnum opus, Possession: A Romance, this is exactly what happened. It became an award-winning sensation, “translated into over 30 languages” and successfully adapted for the big screen.

The Public Domain Review: Roma Lister, Aradia, and the Speculative Origins of a Witchcraft Revival – “In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, ‘the gospel of the witches’, containing a goddess-orientated creation and saviour narrative, purported to descend from an ancient, hermetic tradition of witchcraft in Italy. A. D. Manns explores this text via an enchanting conjecture: that the writer, medium, and witch Roma Lister played a pivotal role in the formation of both Aradia and, therefore, a new form of paganism called Wicca.”

Literary Review of Canada: The Aftermath – Describing this complex science fiction novel as a “mournful debut from Rebecca Hirsch Garcia”, Shazia Hafiz Ramji says Other Evolutions “mutates and contorts in unexpected ways” but is at heart “a simple love letter to Ottawa”.

The New York Times Magazine: The Secret to Getting Through Big, Dense, Difficult Books – While going through “a period of some personal troubles”, Sebastian Castillo felt he needed a book that helped him to “live the rest of [his] life forever meaningfully.” He decided on a little something by Baruch Spinoza… The Ethics no less.

Laura Thompson’s Substack: A Very Patronising Book Review – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, “Agatha Christie’s sixth [novel], was published in June 1926,” becoming the book that changed her “career and with it the genre that she has come to define”, says Laura Thompson. It was also given a patronising thumbs down by critic ‘H. C. O’N’ in the Westminster Gazette. This, she says, is why bad reviews “are only rarely worth worrying about”.

The Korea Times: REVIEW Korean Canadian author explores diaspora experience in debut novel ‘Oxford Soju Club’ – “Korean Canadian first-time author Jinwoo Park [recently] released his debut novel Oxford Soju Club”, a “layered story of suspense, intrigue and mystery, weaving together characters from North Korea, Korean American communities and newly emigrated Koreans in Oxford, England”, says Seoul-based writer Antonia Giordano.

The Dark Academicals Book Club: Memento mori and the Lesbian Gothic: A Q&A with Mallory Pearson – The US artist and author, Mallory Pearson, answers a few questions about her dark academic horror-fantasy, Voice Like a Hyacinth, the portrayal of an “intense, devoted friendship” between five young women.

The Indian Express: ‘Indian English writing is very inferior…’: Author Jeyamohan on language, Salman Rushdie – “In an interview [with Aishwarya Khosla], Jeyamohan asserts that a true writer must be a humble instrument for their native language, drawing from India’s cultural soil to challenge mainstream narratives, rather than serving global English trends or political powers.”

1000 Libraries Magazine: How a Pile of Free Books on a Sydney Footpath Became a Lifeline for the Homeless – Millie Ramm finds “Sydney’s Footpath Library proves that stories belong to everyone, removing the walls and fees to provide anyone who wants a story with a good one.”

The Duck-Billed Reader: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and the Fate of Victorian Spinsters – Claire Laporte on Gaskell’s classic novel, Cranford and “the costs of gentility, the lives not lived”.

Electric Literature: Nonfiction Isn’t False, but Who Says It’s True? – “Nonfiction is a strange term, isn’t it? Defined through fiction’s absence, the label offers denial rather than affirmation: What you’re about to read is not false. Yet is it true? According to whom? How do they know?” asks Laura Moore.

Oregon ArtsWatch: ‘A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin’ honors the work and the life of the iconic novelist – “An expansive exhibit at Oregon Contemporary, curated by the late, great Portland writer’s son, opens up the speculative worlds she created and how she shaped them in words”, reports Marc Mohan.

Prism: With democracy under threat, indie bookstores merge activism and literature for collective care – “Building on the legacy of Black-owned bookstores, Charis Books, Red Emma’s, and other booksellers serve as intellectual and cultural hubs during rising authoritarianism” in America, says Costa Beavin Pappas.

Moomin: Moominvalley winter descends on Stockmann’s fairytale window display 🎩👜 – “This year’s fairytale window displays at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki [features] a winter day in Moominvalley. The window reminds passersby of how the holiday season can also be a challenging time for some, with the Groke embodying the feelings of loneliness.”

Swissinfo: Dorothee Elmiger wins Swiss Book Prize – “Dorothee Elmiger has won this year’s Swiss Book Prize for her novel Die Holländerinnen (The Dutch Women).”

The Butler Did It: The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham – “One of the queens of crime shows us how it’s done”, says Brooke Holgerson of Allingham’s 1927 British crime fiction classic, The White Cottage Mystery – republished this year by Positronic Publishing.

Reactor: Who Wants to Live Forever? – “The concept of immortality is one of the oldest tropes in literature”, says Judith Tarr. Here she scours “the animal kingdom on the quest for immortality”.

Read and Think Deeply: How To Break Through A Reading Slump (And Rediscover Your Love of Reading) – Ryan Hall offers a few “tips for when your reading life stalls”.

Kirkus: Best Fiction of 2025: Charlotte McConaghy – Nina Palattella talks to Australian novelist Charlotte McConaghy about her favourite books of the year and the inspiration behind her mystery novel set on a tiny island near Antarctica, Wild Dark Shore.

ArabLit: Tracing a Line, from Arwa to Enayat – “From Arwa Saleh to Enayat al-Zayat [the Egyptian writer Moaaz Muhammad examines] a society that reproduces its women’s disappointments”.

The Lagos Review: Food Is Served: A Review of “A Meal Is A Meal” by Nnamdi Anyadu – Akumbu Uche – Nigerian writer, Nnamdi Anyadu’s debut short story collection, A Meal Is a Meal, in which “food is the unifying theme […], spans comedy, folklore, and the Gothic”, says fellow writer and storyteller Akumbu Uche.

The Hedgehog Review: Making Sense of Sylvia Plath’s Final Act – “Plath felt that marriage and children were the necessary but insufficient condition of her continued creativity”, says Plath biographer Carl Rollyson in his piece about “the fine line between creation and destruction”.

Do Some Damage: Anton Chekhov: Mystery Writer – Although author Scott Adlerberg is “a lifelong reader of crime fiction,” it was but recently he discovered “Anton Chekhov wrote a mystery novel”, namely: The Shooting Party – “the only novel […] the great playwright and short story writer, ever wrote.”

Varsity: A Cambridge childhood felt through Period Piece – “Ryan Vowles comes to know the artist Gwen Raverat through her perfect childhood memoirs”, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood.

Contemporary Japanese Literature: Swallows – Japanese author, Natsuo Kirino’s contemporary novel, Swallows (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), about “an impoverished young woman who becomes a surrogate birthmother for a high-performing couple”, is surprisingly suspenseful, says Kathryn Hemmann.

The Ink-Stained Desk: Your Guide to Festive Horror This December. 🎄– “What happens when you turn the cozy fireside glow into a sinister spotlight?” The answer, apparently, is “the magic and enduring appeal of Festive Horror Literature.” In this thematic essay, complete with reading suggestions like Brom’s Krampus: The Yule Lord and Alison Littlewood’s Mistletoe, C M Reid has all dark bookish nooks and crannies covered for you this Christmas.

BBC Culture: ‘A wicked wife’: The truth about Tudor England’s ‘most hated woman’ – “The 16th-Century aristocrat Jane Boleyn faced explosive accusations: she was blamed for a shocking betrayal of her husband, as well as two of Henry VIII’s wives, her sister-in-law Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Was she a “sex-mad” spy, guilty-as-charged – or a convenient scapegoat for a tyrant’s brutality? A new historical thriller by Philippa Gregory, Boleyn Traitor, explores her story.”

LARB: Don’t Close Your Teeth – In this essay, “Cynthia Zarin traces the rise of fascism through the diary entries of Virginia Woolf,” harvested from “a collection of excerpts, compiled by her husband, Leonard Woolf, as A Writer’s Diary, [which] first appeared in 1953.”

Monocle: How Solvej Balle turned 18 November into one of literature’s most arresting time loops – “The Booker-shortlisted novelist explains [to Sophie Monaghan-Coombs] how a single day evolved into a seven-book epic, and what it teaches us about ageing, relationships and our sense of time in the real world.”

Miller’s Book Review: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ Reveals About the Threat of AI – “Orwell’s nightmare wasn’t about technology”, says Suzanne Smith, “it was about who controls it”.

British Vogue: It’s Time To Put The “Where Are All The Male Novelists?” Debate To Bed – The Guardian was delighted a man won this year’s Booker Prize after “a decade of female-centred interiors”. Eliza Clark doesn’t agree. She says that “male writers still continue to dominate literary awards” – indeed, “seven of the last 10 Booker Prizes have been won by men.” Women, she argues, are not “shoving male writers out of publishing en masse, [nor is] the #MeToo movement somehow making them afraid to pick up a pen.” On the contrary, male writers are still “viewed as more worthy and deserving of critical plaudits.”

The Anchoress Archives: Druids and Dryden: Some Notes on Collections of Words – “From compendiums to commonplacing” – Katy’s favourite type of books are “collections” (i.e., collations of “information and words”) and she says it is in her “magpie nature to gather information and keep it, to store it and archive it.”

The Yale Review: Shakespeare and Company Interviews Miriam Toews – Adam Biles talks to the Canadian author of A Truce That Is Not Peace “on how writing resembles loss”.

Washington Independent Review of Books: Shy Creatures – Ellen Prentiss Campbell finds British author, Clare Chambers’ historical novel, Shy Creatures, is a “quietly incisive tale [with] echoes [of] the late Barbara Pym”. Set in 1964, Helen, its protagonist is an “intelligent, well educated, middle class […,] middle-aged [woman] dedicated to an interesting job, dutiful to family […,] single [and] attracted to an unsuitable, unavailable man.”

Le Monde: Boualem Sansal returns to France after year-long detention in Algeria – “The writer arrived in France on Tuesday, a week after his release from an Algerian prison, in a case that has strained already fragile ties between Paris and Algiers.”

Jonathan Crain: Beneath the Surface: Chloe Michelle Howarth’s “Heap Earth Upon It” – “Four siblings arrive in a small Irish town in the 1960s, determined to appear ordinary. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Heap Earth Upon It opens with this deceptively simple premise, but beneath the O’Learys’ careful politeness lies something far more combustible.” Jonathan Crain on an intensely dark sapphic novel about obsession. 

The New York Times: Sarah Jessica Parker’s Year of Judging the Booker Prize – “The actor had to read so many books (153) she bowed out of most family activities. Still, she said, collaborating to pick a winner was worth the sacrifice.” She spoke to Alex Marshall who called her “four times during her Booker year.”

Property: Discover Jane Austen’s England, from Pemberly to Sanditon – Alexandra Upton invites you to “step into Jane Austen’s England”.

SLJ: Redefining Classics: Making space for books that will stand the test of time, a guest post by Marcia Argueta Mickelson – Guatemalan-American Marcia Argueta Mickelson, author of YA novel The Writing Room, describes a classic as “a book that stands the test of time due to its universal themes.”

BBC Beds, Herts & Bucks: Book exhibition hails ‘unsung hero’ of publishing – “A new exhibition will shine a light on [Noel Carrington,] an ‘unsung hero’ of publishing who is credited with helping shape children’s reading through the 20th Century”, reports Alex Pope.

The Drift: Escape Artists​ | Romantasy at the End of the World – “The heart swells just thinking about a genuine literary ‘PHENOMENON’ occurring in a country whose days of mass literacy may be behind it. That this phenomenon happens to consist of love stories between imaginary creatures engaging in graphic sex — well, you know what they say about beggars being choosers”, observes Daniel Yadin.

Overthinking Everything: How pen caps work – How do pen caps work? You may think the answer is obvious. Not so… David R. MacIver finds “pen caps’ mechanics are fascinating”.

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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: #IrisMurdoch2026, A Year With Iris Murdoch, Book Week Scotland, Clare Chambers, Frode Grytten, Guy Davenport, Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge, Iida Turpeinen, Iris Murdoch, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Mallory Pearson, Margery Allingham, Natsuo Kirino, Pola Oloixarac, Stephen Orr