Winding Up the Week #465

An end of week recap

“April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

It is currently National Poetry Month in the USA and Canada, a thirty-day celebration of verse in all its forms; and in the States, it is also National School Librarian Day. I feel sure that Argentine chocoholics will be delighted to learn that there are still two more days of the Bariloche Chocolate Festival in the foothills of the Andes, while back in North America, Sunday marks National Caramel Day. 😋

Around the world, whether attending a church service, enjoying a special meal with family or indulging in the odd chocolate egg, I wish all who celebrate the festival a joyful Easter weekend. Equally, I wish you love, peace and delicious coconut macaroons this Passover.

Saturday’s literary birthdays are overwhelmingly those of women and include German writer and composer Bettina von Arnim (1785), Scottish novelist and historian Margaret Oliphant (1828), Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran (1892), French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras (1914), American memoirist, essayist, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou (1928) and American adventure writer Katherine Neville (1945). Meanwhile, Sunday is mainly (if you exclude the first name on the list) male: American author Mary Jane Holmes (1825), American fiction writer Robert Bloch (1917), British-Canadian novelist Arthur Hailey (1920) and English novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz (1955).

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 opinions and 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.

* Straight From the Heart? *

My latest contribution to the Tove Trove library is Letters from Tove (translated by the brilliant Sarah Death), a substantial collection of Tove Jansson’s correspondence to her closest friends and loved ones, edited by Tovian savants Boel Westin and Helen Svensson. >> See From Your Own Tove >>

Also, a brief reminder that there is now a dedicated index page for everything Tove, making it easier to find all the relevant posts. You can access it from the main menu at the top of every Book Jotter page. >> Tove Trove Main Index >>. Plenty more will be happening with this project over the coming months! 🎩👜

* It’s Goodbye Teens and a Baker’s Bun! *

Karen Langley has officially announced her and Simon Thomas’s next biannual reading club challenge, which will take place from 13^th to 19^th April. Kaggsy encourages everyone to join them in reading and writing about books that first appeared in a particular year (chosen by them) – but which year will it be? See if you can guess. During this twelve-month period in the 20^th century, there were new titles from the likes of Iris Murdoch, Cecil Day-Lewis, Patricia Highsmith, John le Carré, H. P. Lovecraft, Gladys Mitchell, V. S. Naipaul, Margaret Laurence, Harold Robbins, Stanisław Lem, Muriel Spark, Vasily Grossman and, quelle surprise, Agatha Christie. It was also the year in which President John F. Kennedy delivered his first live presidential news conference, the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem, Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West, the future Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard was born, and construction of the Berlin Wall began. It is, of course MCMLXI, which means the event must be the 1961 Club.

* Don’t Keep it to Yourself *

Are you drawn to nineteenth‑century ‘sensation’ fiction? Then follow me into this shady alleyway off the main thoroughfare, for I have information concerning one of Victorian literature’s most thrilling and subversive novels. Should it tickle your fancy, I can show you the way to FictionFan’s Book Reviews, where you will find all you need to know about a certain Mary Elizabeth Braddon – a woman of some repute, given to writing books and other such wickedness. Ahh, I see I have your undivided attention now… Shuffle a little closer, if you please, for we must not be overheard. There is a particular book, you see, known as Lady Audley’s Secret… “a thrilling novel of deception and villainy in which the golden-haired heroine is not at all what she seems.” If you wish to read this tale of “class madness, […] bigamy, murder, impersonation, and blackmail” I can show you the way, but you have only one day to do it: Monday 1st June 2026. And to participate you must follow my instructions to the letter, lest you be observed entering… Here is a door marked Kelly’s Thoughts & Ramblings, where you must knock only once to be permitted entry. Beyond it stands a second door bearing a sign that reads Time for a Review-Along!. This is the place! 🤫¹

* Blogs from the Basement * 

Two noteworthy posts from the archive: (1) Wishing to “incorporate more season‑appropriate books into [her] year,” last March Kirsty of The Literary Sisters selected five spring‑themed books she had previously read and enjoyed. Her pick of “perfect choices” for the season included the title featured here, Springtime: A Ghost Story by Michelle de Kretser, a novella in which Frances and Charlie meet “at a party in Melbourne” – but the latter is already married and has a young son. He moves with Frances to “subtropical Sydney,” but she is troubled by a sense “that the world has tipped on its axis.” She takes long walks with her dog around the neighbourhood, hoping to clear her mind, but one day “sees a woman in an old‑fashioned gown” and realises all is not as it should be. You can find out more about this and Kirsty’s other recommended titles at Five Books for Spring. (2) With little time to gather cobwebs, this review from February at Lingering in the grocery aisle fixed on Samantha Rose Parker’s “gem of a book”, Daydreamers Anonymous, about 35-year-old Clara – the daydreamer of the title. To such an extent does she daydream that it is “taking over the reins of her real life” and she cannot “put a stop to it”. She eventually “joins a support group and meets a colorful cast of fellow daydreamers, who could be her people” – but the question remains: will she “ever learn to be present” or is she “doomed [to a] life stuck in her head”. Find out more about this “lovely, warm, and comforting” novel at Review: Daydreamers Anonymous by Samantha Rose Parker. 

* 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 difficult to pick only this one – posted in the last few days:

The Apple and the Pearl, by Rym Kechacha – In her review for Shiny New Books of The Apple and the Pearl, a “clever” fantasy by British writer Rym Kechacha, Helen Parry notes that “of all the arts, ballet casts perhaps the most magical spell.” She outlines a story that unfolds over a single day and is narrated by multiple voices, in which a dance company “warm up, rehearse and build the set for the evening’s performance” of their sole ballet, which shares its title with the book – “all carried out under the threat of abduction by the Fae,” who are eager to spirit them away into the Otherworld. Despite continually moving “back and forth in time and place”, the author “succeeds in making each character entirely distinct […], and captures the uneasy camaraderie, the jealousies and desires that flare between them.” The result, Helen concludes, is an “absorbing and unusual novel.” 

* 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:

**************************** 

Bookreporter: This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life – In This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, the novelist’s first comprehensive biography in more than twenty years, American academic Deborah Lutz draws on meticulous research to offer an intimate new portrait of the “wildest Brontë sister” – a writer of extraordinary power and fierce originality. 

Autumn In My Heart: ‘The Only True Genius I Have Ever Known In My Life’ – As part of her ongoing quest to secure a blue plaque in London for Dame Rebecca West, Deborah Zafer writes a delightful piece on the friendship that blossomed between West and Anaïs Nin.

BBC Culture: ‘Complex, dangerous, sexual beings’: The centuries-old origins of current fairy fiction – “The fairies in faerie romantasy – or erotic ‘fae’ fiction – are not the glittery, do-gooding sprites of children’s stories. They are dangerous, shape-shifting spirits – just as they were in centuries-old folklore, according to a new book [Fairies: A History by Francis Young]. From the ancient Nordic forest fairies and the 15th-Century Mélusine legend to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, faerie folklore is full of deception and seduction.”

British Library: Letters of Dorothy and Janie Bussy – A recent acquisition of letters written by the English novelist and translator Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey) – who was close to the Bloomsbury Group and is best known for her 1949 lesbian novel Olivia – “and of her daughter, the artist Janie Bussy, has now been catalogued”, reports Modern Archives and Manuscripts Assistant Dominic Newman. 

New Voices Down Under: 🦘 It’s thrills, (blood) spills and true love in our March edition. Buckle up! – In the latest issue of this monthly newsletter dedicated to showcasing the best of Australia’s newly released fiction from debut novelists, Meredith Jaffe writes: “Political intrigue meets sizzling romance in our March edition. Plus we meet author Bridie Blake and there are Freebies!”

Literary Review: Plum Assignments – In her new biography Jan Morris: A Life, Sara Wheeler sets out to capture the many-sided personality of James/Jan Morris, the gifted and celebrated travel writer. Married to Elizabeth – “the real heroine of the story”- Morris was, as Wheeler notes, “still siring children” when he began preparing to change gender, ultimately undergoing surgery in 1970. Yet behind the public brilliance lay a more complicated private life: Morris had a strained relationship with the children and “made a habit of demeaning their daughter Susan,” while continuing to behave like “an old-fashioned paterfamilias.” Piers Brendon describes Wheeler’s study as an “enthralling biography,” and it is precisely this blend of admiration and unflinching scrutiny that gives the book its charge.

The Asian Age: Book Review | In Familiar Rooms, Fresh Wonders – “The sentences in this novel are crafted with a surgeon’s hand,” writes Varun Andhare of Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenuddin’s historical novel This Is Where the Serpent Lives—an immensely readable novel of unsentimental brilliance” in which “rich and poor characters [are handled] with an equal delicacy.”

Womack’s Wanderings: A return to the art of reviewing – “Or: when is it not an art, but plagiarism?” Philip Womack argues that “large language models are rendering all reviewers, all journalists, all those who take part in this literary chain, suspect. The consequences will surely be that the book world closes in on itself, making it harder for new voices to come in […]”. 

The Harvard Gazette: Writing about a pet frog is trivial? Anne Fadiman disagrees. – Anne Fadiman, author of Frog: And Other Essays, tells Liz Mineo: “We need beauty, wit, and attention to small things even more when we have to face large, painful things”. 

Chicago Review of Books: Defending Science Fiction in “Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy” – “The genre of science fiction has been stereotyped and maligned for too long, and two of its contemporary champions, Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, would like to set the record straight”, says Max Gray. Here he shares his thoughts on their “smart and engaging” book-about-books, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. 

Literary Hub: Six Retellings That Pull Apart Fairy Tales and Stitch Them Back Together in New and Wondrous Ways – Bar Fridman‑Tell, author of Honeysuckle – a reimagining of the story of Blodeuwedd from Welsh mythology – has been “enthralled” by fairy tales “pretty much from the moment [she] learned to read”, and her fascination with them has only deepened over time. In this piece, she highlights six books that “take a fairy tale and pull one thread loose, to see what happens next” – among them the featured title, White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link.

The Seaboard Review of Books: 🍁 Throwback Thursday: January, February, June or July, by Helen Fogwill Porter – January, February, June or July, by the late Canadian author and activist Helen Fogwill Porter, was first published in 1988. Set in inner‑city St. John’s, in a working‑class, single‑parent family, it follows a young girl navigating the shock and secrecy of an unexpected pregnancy. As Robin McGrath notes in her review, the novel “deserves attention if only to remind us of how far we’ve come in the intervening years.”

The Times of India: Old walls, New Worlds: Mehrauli reading room pairs books with history – “Nestled within [Delhi’s] Mehrauli Archaeological Park, an old structure has found new life as a charming reading nook, igniting an enthusiasm for books and history among its guests”, finds Sara Siddiqui.

Biographers Conversation: 🦘 ‘This Country Is My Mind’ – “During a Biographers in Conversation interview with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies, Dr Theodore Ell shares details of his latest project: This Country Is My Mind, an authorised biography of Les Murray, Australia’s greatest poet.”

The Yale Review: Quiver and Fixity – The author Jhumpa Lahiri reveals “what [she] found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife”.

Miller’s Book Review: Orwell, Lewis, and Us: What Contemporaries Share Without Seeing: Why Our Fiercest Opponents Are Often Our Closest Relatives – The essay begins from the observation that opponents in any serious dispute “tend to share more presuppositions than they contest”, a pattern that Miller argues holds true for the two writers he describes as the “medieval Christian and the medieval pagan” – i.e. C.S. Lewis and George Orwell. Despite their ideological differences, he suggests, they “stood upon the same floor, a floor built from shared cosmological premises, shared assumptions about hierarchy and order [and] shared habits of mind inherited from centuries of inhaling the same intellectual air.”

Nippon.com: Yagisawa Satoshi: An Interview with the Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Author About His International Bestseller – “More than a decade after its original publication in Japanese, Yagisawa Satoshi’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop came to explosive global attention with translations into Italian and then English. In this interview, Yagisawa discusses how the road to becoming an internationally successful writer was not an easy one.”

Philosophy Now: A Very Short History of Critical Thinking – “Critical thinking is not linked to a particular discipline or a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it must operate through all disciplines and should aim to preserve the advantages of skepticism without having to pay the price of ignorance.” Luc de Brabandere, author of The Art of Thinking in a Digital World: Be Logical – Be Creative – Be Critical, “summarises a long history through key figures of thought.”

Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society: Those daring Olivier sisters – Ann Kennedy Smith introduces the four Olivier sisters, recounts Virginia Woolf’s brief involvement with their circle and quotes their biographer, Sarah Watling, who writes: “If Rupert [Brooke] conceived and developed the closest thing to a Neo‑Pagan ideology, the Oliviers were the driving force behind the outdoor gatherings for which the group became known.” Her book, Noble Savages, is featured here.

Matilda Bookshop: 🦘 Book Reading Guide – A superb PDF guide produced by a South Australian bookshop, showcasing some of the “best new books, selected by Australia’s leading booksellers”, including The Wish, Heather Morris’s latest historical novel, which explores the “bond between [a] terminally ill teen” and a “reclusive CGI artist” – two strangers “united by a shared project”.

Contemporary Japanese Literature: The Tatami Galaxy – “The Tatami Galaxy is a magical realist comedy set in Kyoto in the early 2000s. The author, Tomihiko Morimi, is famous for his over-the-top characters and offbeat urban fantasy, and [his book] takes the reader on a wild ride through a set of parallel universes.”

The Baffler (via Archive Today): Neverending Stories – “We no longer know how to ask for originality because we haven’t seen it lately”, says J.W. McCormack. Here he considers how publishers squeeze profits from dead authors’ unfinished novels.

Radhika Jones: ‘It’s Fun for Me to Have a Book About Time That Seems to Eat People’s Time’ – Radhika talks to “Barbara Epler at New Directions about Solvej Balle’s ‘On the Calculation of Volume’ [Volume IV is due to appear very soon], the meaning of ephemera, and what happens when the time loop comes to an end”.

The Observer (via Archive Today): You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love by Jean-Noël Orengo – Chris Power, reviewing the historical novel You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love (translated into English by Dr David Watson), writes: “The French author [Jean-Noël Orengo] attempts to use fiction to demystify the life of Hitler’s architect and confidant Albert Speer”.

49^th Shelf: 🍁 Reconciling Worlds Within and Without – A recommended reading list by Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, the North Vancouver-based author of The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street: A Memoir, an extraordinary account of a family separated by distance and borders, divided between Taiwan and Canada in the wake of shifting global powers. You can also watch a recent interview with her at The British Columbia Review: ‘Wiley Ho – A writing community‘.

Asymptote: The Question of The Diabolic Tragedy – “Just over one year ago, a so-called casebook edition of a rediscovered early nineteenth-century French prose poem was published by Brill. But based on the contents of the volume, it’s unclear whether the literary work in question is really a 200-year-old text. In the following essay, Dylan White untangles this compelling scholarly mystery.”

Cultured: Humans Have Evolved toThink We’re All-Powerful. Author Louise Erdrich Is Here to Remind Us We’re Not. – “Python’s Kiss, the [American] author’s new collection of short stories, zeroes in on the perspectives of children and non-humans to make sense of our troubled world”, says Sophie Lee.

NPR: In Kenan Orhan’s debut novel ‘The Renovation,’ a hole in the bathroom tears open time and space – In Kenan Orhan’s debut novel a Turkish school psychologist living in Salerno with her husband and her father, who has dementia, hires builders to add a second bathroom to make their flat safer and more manageable, but instead, the men construct a Turkish women’s prison cell. Here Kenan Orhan talks with Scott Simon about The Renovation. You may also enjoy reading Susan Osborne’s newly posted review of this title, The Renovation by Kenan Orhan: Exile and memory, at A Life in Books.

A Good Hard Stare: Inside the Even Bigger Whale – Or “how [Henry Begler] tried and failed to write an essay on the State of Contemporary Literature” after being sent into a “mild state of crisis” upon rereading “George Orwell’s 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’ for the first time in years”.

Double Descent:
Publishers Weekly: A Country Losing Its Grip: PW Talks with Marc Bennetts – Marc Bennetts’ The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness “explores the bleak national psychology behind Russia’s long decline into authoritarianism.” He speaks to William Boisvert about his time living there and what comes after Putin.
The Times (via Archive Today): Lies and fear: my life under the Kremlin’s propaganda machine – Bennetts was the Times Russia correspondent for many years – until “a story he wrote made him the target of Kremlin rage.” In his new book, “he reveals how Vladimir Putin brainwashed his people”.

Cairo Scene: Six Historic Bookshops Keeping the Arab World’s Literary Soul Alive – “From Beirut to Cairo,” Yasmin Farhat finds “these bookshops stand as cultural sanctuaries where paper, politics, and memory endure in a region still writing itself.”

ItsBookTalk: Listed: 18 Under the Radar April Books – “There are so many upcoming books that sound so good, yet they are barely (if at all) being mentioned anywhere”, says Renee, so she’s sharing a few of them here, along with a handful that are being hyped to heck.

The Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today): ‘True Color’ Review: Not-So-Black-and-White – “In the early 1900s, defining color in the dictionary required the expertise of a scientist”, says Belinda Lanks in her review of Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink – a journey through colours and the words we use to describe them.

The Conversation: How ‘eco‑dystopian’ novels from Asia and Africa are pushing boundaries – Visions of environmental disaster are shaping world literature. Alastair Bonnett shares his “favourite examples from China and Taiwan, Nigeria and India.”

The Irish Times (via Archive Today): James Joyce – A Political Life by Frank Callanan: Depth and detail over a wide historical canvas – Terence Killeen finds “Frank Callanan scrutinises Joyce’s views on Irish politics in astonishing detail and depth in this posthumous tour de force”, James Joyce: A Political Life.

Alta: The California Novel No One Can Find – “Collectors have been tracking an 1854 outlaw tale from gold rush San Francisco to the alleys of Mexico City—and beyond.” Geoffrey Gray joins “the hunt.”

Caught by the River: Tiny Gardens Everywhere – In this extract from Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A History of Urban Resilience, she explores the world of gardeners through time who “turned vacant land into lush, fertile landscapes.” You may also enjoy reading a brief review of this title in Kirkus: ‘A riveting social history of the world, as seen through gardens.’

Big Think: How “Project Hail Mary” turns hardcore science into page-turning drama – “Andy Weir’s [sci-fi] novel [Project Hail Mary] blends humor, scientific rigor, and human ingenuity to make science fiction feel believable and thrilling.”

The Common Reader: Laura Thompson on Agatha Christie: Shakespeare, Murder, and the Art of Simplicity – Either listen to or read Henry Oliver’s discussion with Laura Thompson, author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. He had so many questions for her: What did Christie read? Why was she so productive during the war? Was she pro‑hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? He had enormous “fun” making this episode!

The Monthly (via Archive Today): 🦘 Prose encounters: ‘Capture’ and ‘The Season for Flying Saucers’ – They are “Amanda Lohrey’s unsettling fable centred on a psychiatrist’s research into alien abduction, and Brendan Colley’s warmly funny romp about the effect of a returned abductee on his family”, writes Beejay Silcox of the two Tasmanian-based authors.

A Narrative Of Their Own: Short Story Salon – We can never get enough Dorothy Parker at Book Jotter, so here she is again, this time in a piece from Kate Jones about The Portable Dorothy Parker, her collection of verse, stories, essays and journalism first published in 1944 (updated in 1989 and reprinted in 2006 with an introduction by Marion Meade).

Polskie Radio: Polish writer Wiesław Myśliwski dies at 94 – “Acclaimed Polish writer Wiesław Myśliwski died on Sunday, four days after celebrating his 94th birthday.”

The Lagos Review: The colour of grief in Angel Patricks Amegbe’s ‘No Pink In A Rainbow’ – Kehinde Folorunsho – “There is no denying the fact that childlessness is perhaps the most devastating predicament for the African woman”, observes Kehinde Folorunsho in his review of Angel Patricks Amegbe’s novel about miscarriage, No Pink in a Rainbow.

Aeon: Bitch: a history – “The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?” asks Karen Stollznow, linguist and author of Bitch: The Journey of a Word.

AI AI – Two for one:
Intelligencer (via Archive Today): The People Falsely Accused of Using AI – “Clean, precise prose is now a liability. Non-native English speakers and autistic writers are paying the price”, warns Emma Alpern.
The Pharmakon: Why LLMs Ruin Everything – Sam Leith holds forth on “Matt Goodwin, Alex Preston and the Bookpocalypse.”

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

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 term, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

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

1. Sorry FF, I got a little carried away! 🤭