An end of week recap
“A book, like a culture, says to its reader: My dear, I’m yours. You are free to do with me what you will. I am your entrance into yourself and into history at the same time.”
– Jerzy Kosinski
Next week I will be taking another short break in Oban (you may recall, I went there last April), a lovely little town on the west coast of Scotland. I won’t return until the middle of the following week, which means my next wind up, on 2nd May, might be a bit shorter than usual. 🦭
In the United States, National Columnists’ Day is celebrated today, and tomorrow the Academy of American Poets observes Poetry & The Creative Mind Day as part of National Poetry Month. National Library Week also begins today – an occasion founded by the American Library Association (ALA). And, on a lighter note, it is both National Cat Lady Day and Refresh Your Goals Day (could there really be a day in our bookish world when this doesn’t happen?).
Among the literary folk born on this day in history are American war correspondent and fiction writer Richard Harding Davis (1864), American poet and writer (married to C. S. Lewis) Joy Davidman (1915), American Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925), Honduran author and poet Roberto Sosa (1930), American experimental writer and performance artist Kathy Acker (some say 1947), American feminist, journalist and author Susan Faludi (1959), South African-American novelist Tarryn Fisher (1983) and Australian actress and author Alexandra Adornetto (1992). Then, looking ahead to Sunday, we mark the birthdays of British poet and author Richard Hughes (1900) and African-American poet Etheridge Knight (1931).
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.
* A Child’s-Eye View of Modern Britain *
Yet another member of our remarkable book blogging community is preparing to celebrate the publication of her latest work of non‑fiction, We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain. A senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, Dr Laura Tisdall explains in her post, Shameless self‑promotion: We Have Come To Be Destroyed, that the book – which draws on “thousands of child-authored sources” – reveals “a history of Cold War Britain (c.1956 to c.1989) through the eyes of children and young people”. Numerous subjects are explored, ranging from “the sexual revolution to anti-nuclear activism to school student unions to mass youth unemployment in the 1980s.” The London launch will take place at Waterstones Gower St at 6.30pm on Wednesday 13th May (simply follow the link provided to purchase tickets), and she will also be speaking at the Chalke History Festival near Salisbury on 23rd and 24th June. Laura would be delighted to welcome you to these and other planned promotional events. 🥂🍾
* Blogs from the Basement *
Newly recovered from our dusty archive: (1) We travel back to October 2025 and to Reading in Translation, where we revisit Leyla Shukurli’s review of Banine’s rediscovered classic, Parisian Days. See Writing as Identity: Banine’s “Parisian Days,” Translated from French by Anne Thompson‑Ahmadova to discover why this memoir feels so much “ahead of its time”. (2) In August 2025, Diana of Thoughts on Papyrus celebrated her 500th post with an array of “beautiful book covers” from Japan. In Japanese Book Covers (Favourite Books), she shares several “intricate, detailed artworks or minimalist designs,” all well worth revisiting. (3) Finally, we end with Marcie’s Bookish Books: The Best Kind of Books? – posted at Buried in Print in March 2025. She says she’s “always in the mood for a book about books.” Are you?
* 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:
Faeries, Elves, and Goblins: The Old Stories by Rosalind Kerven – Review – Clare (aka The Grimm Librarian) – “a self-professed fairytale, folklore, and mythology nerd” – introduces readers to a “charming selection of fairytales” curated by Rosalind Kerven, a British independent researcher of narrative folklore and the author of numerous books on myths, legends and folktales. Faeries, Elves and Goblins: The Old Stories, a collection of “over 25 stories from English, Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Welsh folklore”, brings together “ancient spells” accompanied by “wonderful fairytale illustrations” – including “some by Arthur Rackham, the renowned fairytale illustrator from the Victorian era.” Clare “highly” recommends this volume to “anyone who enjoys short story collections and folklore from the British Isles.” Her full review includes a helpful listing of the main titles featured among these traditional tales.
* 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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Black Inc: 🦘 A Q&A with Kate Holden – In this question-and-answer session with Melbourne-based writer Kate Holden, author of the recently published essay collection The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times, she chatted about “writing, nostalgia and malaise in our modern times.” You may also wish to read The Saturday Review’s short critique of this title: Kate Holden The Ruin of Magic.
Independent (via Archive Today): ‘People do come before books’: The extreme sacrifices Muriel Spark made for writing – “The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Girls of Slender Means wrote novels of singular, idiosyncratic genius.” In Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, her latest biography, James Bailey asks: “was it her unapologetic decision to put writing above motherhood and marriage that made them possible?” You can also read David Robinson’s recent review of this book for The Scotsman, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey review: ‘inventive’.
Reading in the Sentimental Age: Krisztina Tóth’s Dystopia at Home – Milena Billik was “swallowed” up “from [the] first pages” of Hungarian writer and poet Krisztina Tóth’s near-future dystopian novel Eye of the Monkey (translated by Ottilie Mulzet), in which a doctor-patient love affair goes awry.
The Spectator (via Archive Today): The typo that spelled death in the Soviet Union – “When Pravda Vostoka misprinted Joseph Stalin’s military rank on 25 October 1944, most of the print run was destroyed and the editorial team was shot”. Anna Aslanyan reviews Rebecca Lee’s book of literary errors, Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books.
Aeon: Living without my self – “Our culture valorises the big, coherent self”, declares Mette Leonard Høeg, author of Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory. Yet in the works of the Austrian philosophical writer Robert Musil, she finds something different: reading him, she says, “helps [her] embrace the beauty of [her] no-self existence”.
The Miramichi Reader: 🍁 There’s Always More to Say by Natalie Southworth – “With her debut collection There’s Always More to Say, Natalie Southworth demonstrates that she not only understands the skills necessary to write powerful short stories, she has no shortage of them”, says Jeff Dupuis. In fact, he continues, this title “will fit well on your bookshelf tucked between the works of Mavis Gallant and Carol Shields.”
AnOther: “They Blind You with Love”: Grace Coddington on Her Love of Cats – In a new book by feline photographer Walter Chandoha, the legendary stylist writes about a lifetime spent loving cats. Grace Coddington has selected this excerpt from a new collection of his unpublished work, Walter Chandoha: Family Cats From the Archive 1949-1962.
The Critic: What Pullman gets wrong about Narnia – “Philip Pullman is more like C.S. Lewis than he might think”, argues Caleb Woodbridge, a writer, editor and cultural critic with a background in medievalism and children’s literature.
The Irish Times (via Archive Today): Author Emma Donoghue: ‘I grew up very normal, yet had this secret side that I thought everyone would consider foul’ – “The writer on literary reputation, emigration and ‘the crushing weight of being the only gay in the village’”. Martin Doyle finds Emma Donoghue is “a strikingly cheerful, good-humoured interviewee”.
The Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today): ‘The Wanderers’ Review: This Side of Survival – “Less fearful of the uncertainties ahead under Stalin than the guaranteed persecution under Hitler, many Polish Jews chose to head east”, writes Diane Cole in her review of Daniela Gerson’s The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II.
LARB: Fantasy Dismantled – Saïd Khatibi’s The End of the Sahara, the first Algerian crime novel translated from Arabic by [Alexander Elinson for] Bitter Lemon Press, potently critiques Orientalist fantasies of desert romance”, writes Amany Alsiefy.
The Collector: The Tumultuous Life and Work of Leo Tolstoy – “He was a count who shunned high society and a writer who renounced his work. [Stefan Pajovic unravels] the complex and fascinating life of Leo Tolstoy.”
The Duck-Billed Reader: Is Marriage Just an Interruption in Your Real Life? – In David Copperfield, the protagonist “tells the tale of his ill-fated first marriage as if it is a dream, or perhaps a mere interruption in his life’s progress”, observes Claire Laporte.
The Times (via Archive Today): Why isn’t this British dystopia as well known as Nineteen Eighty-Four? – English classicist, writer and translator Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome “came out eight years before George Orwell’s famous novel. Its portrait of homegrown fascism is just as unnerving”, says Sam Corbett.
CrimeReads: The 5 Best Mysteries for Jane Austen Lovers – “Amelia Blackwell on the charming world of Austen-inspired mysteries.”
My Bookshop Backstory: What’s the point of hardbacks? – Indie bookseller and editor of Backstory magazine, Tom Rowley, “spoke to readers, authors, editors, bosses of publishers small and big, publicists, newspapers’ literary editors, the head of Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, agents, printers and industry data analysts” in search of an answer to the question: “What is the point of hardbacks?”
The Daily Star: Aruna Chakravarti’s ghosts don’t just scare, they remember – Bengali author Aruna Chakravarti says she is attempting “a completely new genre” in her new short story collection Creeping Shadows: 13 Ghost Stories. Mitali Chakravarty describes it as “a gripping read that haunts and lingers beyond its pages.”
4Columns: Superstars – “Cultish French writer” Ann Scott’s LGB novel Superstars – first published in 2000 and now reissued in English in Jonathan Woollen’s translation – unfolds, as Brian Dillon puts it, “amid a ’90s Parisian milieu of techno beats, club drugs, and bisexual ravers.” He describes the book as “a story about parallel desires for something inhuman and ego-destroying—a familiar tale about letting art be the less grueling or fatal version of that satisfaction.”
The Dark Academicals Book Club: ‘The Library at Hellebore’ and the violence of academia – A fascinating piece about dedication – “candlelight and cleverness, ink-stained fingers and half-finished thoughts” and the kind of academic obsession that edges toward “self-harm”. All this unfolds while reading The Library at Hellebore, Cassandra Khaw’s cosmic horror novel set within an elite academy for gods and monsters. You may also enjoy listening to the accompanying podcast episode.
The Conversation: 🦘 How Norman Lindsay wrote the The Magic Pudding to critique ‘Australian values’ – inspired by Nietzsche – The Australian way of life displayed in The Magic Pudding (1918) revolves around the life of the belly, not the life of the mind, according to John Uhr, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the Australian National University.
The Decade Project: Blindness—José Saramago – “The most visually striking feature of Blindness is its lack of punctuation other than commas and periods,” says Robert Boyd Skipper. In fact, this 1995 novel about an epidemic of ‘white blindness’, translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero “was the closest [he’s] ever felt to blindness while still seeing all the words”. He describes reading it as “an immersive experience”.
WWD: Miu Miu Literary Club Returns to Milan Design Week to Talk Politics of Desire, Sexuality, Female Empowerment – Martino Carrera reveals all that is happening at Miu Miu’s upcoming Literary Club, a three-day literature-centric event taking place from 22nd to 24th April at the Circolo Filologico venue during Milan Design Week under the direction of Miuccia Prada. It all kicks off with French writer Annie Ernaux and her 2016 memoir A Girl’s Story.
The Culturist: The Essentials of Italian Literature – “Everyone knows Dante […], but after him, most would struggle to name even just three Italian authors. This was not always the case, however.” For this reason, The Culturist community have decided to “share 5 works of Italian literature that absolutely deserve to be included in the Great Books canon.”
Quill & Quire: 🍁 In Crow’s Field – Canadian playwright and author Judith Thompson’s In Crow’s Field “delivers what can feel like a relentless onslaught of unsettling content – classism, sexism, assault, exploitation, violation, suicide”; however, it “evolves into a powerful tale of redemption, and a painfully accurate portrait of the thankless trials of youth”, says Stacey May Fowles.
Books + Bits: INTERVIEW: Sophia Smith Galer on how to kill a language – Pandora Sykes talks at length with writer, multilinguist and “passionate advocate for language diversity” Sophia Smith Galer about her new book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words, “in which she charts the death of languages around the globe, known as ‘linguicide’.”
Vogue: A Rare Interview With Nobel-Winning Author Han Kang – Nick Hilden speaks to Han Kang, the South Korean writer and the first Asian woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, about her latest work of non‑fiction, Light and Thread, exploring “the tenacity necessary to break cycles of violence and how ‘sensing and imagining’ offer a remedy for despair.”
Washington Independent Review of Books: The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru: A Novel – According to Nicole Yurcaba, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru – a tale in which “mystical Russian expats untangle dark family secrets in 1920s Paris” – is “a masterful [gothic mystery] that avoids many of the genre’s tropes.”
Afrocritik: The Best 15 African Political Novels of the Last Decade – In “the second and third decades of the 21st century, […] politically themed African novels and fiction have visibly dwindled”, says Chimezie Chika — a trend he finds “troubling”, given that “many of the same political issues that earlier African writers fought over remain unresolved.” In response, he sets out to highlight “novels and works of fiction [that he] can […] point to as genuinely engaging with [the continent’s] contemporary politics” — among them The Termite Colony, Ike Okonta’s 2025 novel, which takes an “unflinching look at the political battleground that is Nigeria.”
The Reading List: 11 books to read if you’ve been obsessed with the Artemis II mission – This week, “a reading list for anyone interested in the moon, astronauts or space exploration”, including Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, in which “Rebecca Boyle tells the story of the Moon across deep time, from its formation to its continuing influence on Earth today.”
The American Scholar: First Love, Faded Bloom – Joy Lanzendorfer reflects on rereading Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind “on a trip through the South”.
ABC News: 🦘 Debra Adelaide reflects on friendship with Gabrielle Carey in When I Am Sixty-Four – Debra Adelaide became friends with Gabrielle Carey when they were 12. After Carey died by suicide five decades later, Adelaide tried to address her unanswered questions in a novel. There was also a piece by Jen Webb in The Conversation last month about this novel: Words can’t save a life – but they can capture it. Debra Adelaide farewells friend Gabrielle Carey.
Seven Stories Press: Excerpt: Artem Chapeye’s “The Weathering,” translated from Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons – In Artem Chapeye’s The Weathering (translated by Daisy Gibbons), “two struggling freelancers return from a relaxing country vacation to find their home city of Kyiv transformed into an apocalyptic dystopia.”
The Arts Fuse: Book Review: “A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” — The Ascent of Two Outsiders – “For biographer Andrew Durbin, [gay artists] Peter Hujar and Paul Thek are historical figures from a lost era that he wants to discover on his own terms”, says Trevor Fairbrother of The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.
Quillette: To Meet a Chatbot – English professor Matthew M. Davis “burns the midnight oil talking to Microsoft Copilot about Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hawthorne, and a play he’s been working on—and comes away deeply impressed by its literary insights.”
Two Brontës for one:
University of Chester: Chester Professor among first to examine long-lost Brontë manuscript – “A University of Chester Professor is one of the first people to see and study a lost manuscript by literary great, Charlotte Brontë.”
BBC News England: ‘Our wind farm won’t discourage Bronte tourists’ – “The developers of England’s largest wind farm have claimed that the turbines will not discourage visitors to moors once loved by the Bronte sisters”, reports Spencer Stokes.
Zócalo Public Square: Sketchbook: Moss in Motion – “Emmi Salonen is a Finnish designer and educator whose work centers on ‘positive creativity,’ the idea that design can connect people, support well-being, and encourage sustainable choices. She is also the author of The Creative Wellbeing Handbook, which explores how creatives can reduce stress and avoid burnout.” You can read an extract from her book at Creative Review: How to fuel creativity, find balance and stay inspired.
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): How to Poison an Ocean – In this piece drawn from The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea, Jeffrey Marlow drills down into Trump’s vision for a “new era of offshore oil” extraction and warns that “scientists know all too well how that story ends.”
TNR: Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and the Art of Self-Reinvention – Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, “Julia Cooke’s biography of three writers illuminates the profound complexity of women’s lives without apologizing, justifying, or moralizing”, says Sarah Menkedick.
Medievalists.net: New Medieval Books: Vikings Behaving Reasonably – “This book offers more than just a clever title.” Robert L. Lively’s Vikings Behaving Reasonably: Nordic Hóf in Civic and Legal Rhetoric “shows how Norse communities relied on the ideal of hóf—a cultural expectation of moderation and restraint—to resolve disputes and maintain order, often without the need for a strong central authority.”
The Times (via Archive Today): Weimar Germany’s carnival dance of death – “In his excellent book Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy, Victor Sebestyen describes the propaganda, suspicion and resentment that led to the rise of Hitler”, writes Max Hastings.
The Verge: Spotify now sells printed books – Jess Weatherbed reports that “Spotify is rolling out some new updates for book lovers, expanding audiobook listening features and allowing users to buy physical publications through the platform.”
The Spinoff: ‘Calamities and care’: Elizabeth Knox’s profoundly moving memoir, reviewed – “Claire Mabey reviews Night, Ma, the astonishingly honest new memoir from one of New Zealand’s most evocative and insightful writers.”
BBC Future: Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy – “Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness”. But why did they die out in the first place?” asks Sophie Hardach.
Ars Technica: For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store – “Post-2013 Kindles will continue to work, even if they no longer receive updates”, says Andrew Cunningham, as Amazon send contact owners of older devices to inform them that “starting on May 20 they [will] no longer be able to buy or download books from the Kindle Store.”
CTV News: 🍁 Library on Quebec-Vermont border gets new entrance after U.S. limited access for Canadians – Kelly Greig reports that “for decades, people in Stanstead were allowed to walk around the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, but last year the U.S. limited access.” As she explains, Canadians have recently been forced to “drive down the street and go through a border crossing just to get in the front door.” However, access is now set to improve with the installation of a new entrance that leads directly into the library from the Canadian side.
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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 term, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.
>> See my monthly digest at the Book Jotter Journal on Substack. >>
Categories: Winding Up the Week
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