An end of week recap

“A great book is in effect a view of the universe, complete for the time being. You must get inside it to look out upon the old familiar world with the author’s unfamiliar eyes.”
– Jacques Barzun

Today is Anne and Samantha Day, when we can celebrate the lives of Anne Frank and Samantha Smith, two young girls whose voices continue to resonate.

For those in the Northern Hemisphere, as the solstice tips us into the long light of summer on Sunday, may your days be bright, your reading plentiful and your shelves a source of enduring fulfilment – and for friends in the Southern Hemisphere, I hope the turning season bring its own calm, cosy delights.

It is also Audiobook Appreciation Month, an annual celebration devoted to the enjoyment of – and engagement with – recordings of books read aloud.

We have a weekend of big bookish birthdays ahead. On Saturday, we can raise a glass to Polish poet and author Aleksander Fredro (1793), American novelist, poet and essayist Josephine Johnson (1910), Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920), Estonian writer Enn Vetemaa (1936), French poet and novelist Jean‑Claude Izzo (1945), Irish poet Paul Muldoon (1951), Indian novelist and poet Vikram Seth (1952) and American author of detective fiction Robert Crais (1953). On Sunday, you may feel moved to refill your glass and toast Brazilian novelist, poet and short‑story writer Machado de Assis (1839), French philosopher, novelist and all‑round clever clogs Jean‑Paul Sartre (1905), American novelist, critic and political activist Mary McCarthy (1912), French novelist Françoise Sagan (1935), Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski (1948), British novelist Ian McEwan (1948), Canadian novelist and poet Jane Urquhart (1949), Guyanese‑born British poet and children’s writer John Agard (1949) and Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist Anne Carson (1950).

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.

* Blogs from the Basement * 

Permit me to lead you back to 2021 and a review that will undoubtedly appeal to those taking part in Mallika Ramachandran’s Reading the Meow 2026. Lafcadio Hearn’s The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale, first published in 1898 (and recently republished with wonderful illustrations by Anita Kreituse), was featured by Angela at Curious Ordinary almost six years ago. This legend told as fiction relates the story of “a young boy who loved drawing cats so much that he sketched them everywhere” and, though he “wasn’t a strong boy” – indeed, his parents fretted about his future – he was a gifted artist. He was therefore taken to a monastery to become “an acolyte”, but his drawing of cats became ever more obsessive, and he was sent away in disgrace. Despite this, his talent would eventually save the day when his fantastic felines came to life one night. You must read Angela’s post, The Boy Who Drew Cats, to find out what happened. 🐈

*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 recent weeks:

BOOK REVIEW: Nymph by Sofia Montrone – Set across two blistering summers in the mountains of Northern Italy, Sofia Montrone’s Nymph, a “contemporary, languid, and decadent coming-of-age story”, follows Leo, a young girl working as a maid in her family’s shabby farm‑stay, who endures a tragedy that alters the course of her life. At first, the protagonist, who “develops strange hoarding tendencies”, is “perpetually in her head, wading through a myriad of thoughts” and held “between devotion and disappointment for her [charming but alcoholic] father”. Years later, she meets Dolores, an American girl who “acts as a catalyst,” forcing her to shed her “old shell” and realise “that we can only preserve love through the memories we leave behind.” This wistful Sapphic work “perfectly encapsulates Leo’s essence as a wild spirit bound to a landscape like a mythological nymph”, yet it “requires patience to match its deliberate, stream-of-consciousness style,” says reviewer The Bibliophile In The Castle, Kiki Skjaldmær. Nonetheless, it “rewards you tenfold.”

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I often 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 on your literary rambles through cyberspace, here are a selection of interesting snippets:

If you would like to stay up to date with the latest Tove Jansson and Moomin news, views and events, please head over to Tove Telegraph. 🎩👜

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Asymptote: ⚣ Face to the Wall: An Interview with Chantel Acevedo – In Cages, Chantel Acevedo “puzzles together the portrait of […] a complicated man”, once “a Cuban zookeeper and former exile in London”, now nearing death in ’80s Miami. Seen “through the eyes of those who know him”, this historical novel “attempts to explain Felix to his estranged daughter.” In conversation with Mary Noorlander, the author reflects on “the limitations imposed upon us by society, the ones we impose on ourselves, what it means to truly know someone, and whether that knowledge is worth the torment.” 

The Yale Review: ✍️ Annie Ernaux: Unpublished journal entries – “I am back in writing hell. As if each time I start writing, I have to go through the same hell again.” Excerpts from Annie Ernaux: Writing, The Other Life, a forthcoming assemblage of interviews, critical essays, diary fragments and previously unpublished texts – interleaved with drawings, photographs, clippings and other ephemera – offering an intimate, many‑voiced portrait of Ernaux’s creative life. Published by Seven Stories Press on 27^th October 2026. 

Miller’s Book Review: Why I’m Still Reading ‘Problematic’ Children’s Books to My Daughter – “Pharisaism, puritanism—whatever you want to call it—ranks among our species’ more annoying qualities. And it entirely misses the point of reading with children”, says Joel J Miller. Here he makes a rational and persuasive defence of “reading great (and imperfect) classics together—without turning every story into a moral purity test”.

The Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today): ‘Paul Celan’ Review: Verse and Testimony – “Paul Celan survived the Holocaust and became the most consequential postwar German‑language poet”, says Benjamin Balint in his review of the German‑speaking Romanian’s groundbreaking biography Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno (translated by Soren Gauger).

Literary Merit: 📖 7 Elements I Look for in Books – “All of these books taught me something, thanks to the honesty of their authors, who faced the chaos of life head-on and then wrote it down.” Reader, writer, library worker and “indoorsy introvert” Andrea Bass shares the seven elements she seeks in the books she reads.

The Minnesota Star Tribune (via Archive Today): Review: Pulitzer winner’s ‘Villa Coco’ is 266 pages of pure pleasure – Chris Hewitt reads Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco, in which “an American archivist, hired to catalogue an elderly baronessa’s antiques, finds himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures in the Italian countryside.” You can also read Clemmie Read’s review of this historical novel in The Spectator: Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed.

The Seaboard Review of Books: 🍁🪖 A Vacation for Victory by Kelsey M. Lonie – A Vacation for Victory “offers a comprehensive look at the historical context and the interconnected factors of geography and culture that influenced the timing and structure of the Women’s Land Army and similar initiatives in Canada”, writes Lisa Timpf. She adds that it is “well worth checking out for those interested in women’s history, and what happened on the home front during World War I and II.”

The Public Domain Review: 🛸 Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds – “Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting.” Richard Fallon explores this “lost world” novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors.”

Financial Times (via Archive Today): A modern tragedy: the Iranian revolution and its legacy – “Three new books, from a sweeping history to narrower and more personal accounts, explore the fractious relationship between the state and its people”, says Sanam Vakil. The title featured here is poet Mahvash Sabet’s Open Wide the Doors: A Memoir of Faith, Hope and Freedom in Iran (translated by Bahíyyih Nakhjavání and Azita Mottahedeh), which recalls her arrest in 2008. She was among the Bahá’i Seven, a collective of community leaders from Iran’s heavily persecuted religious minority, the Bahá’ís – and here she paints a picture of Iranian society from within the confines of jail.

Hyperallergic: 🏖️🎨 12 Art Books to Kick Off Summer – “A novel lampooning the art world, Megan O’Grady’s meditation on art and living, the man who defined color in the dictionary, Nan Goldin’s tender photo essay” and Jennifer Higgie’s Bedlam, a historical novel which focuses on a year in the life of “Victorian-era painter Richard Dadd, who is now remembered primarily for the tragic details of his life and institutionalization.”

4Columns: 🛸 We Were Forbidden – “A new volume collects three never-before-translated novellas by Jacqueline Harpman [1929-2012], author of I Who Have Never Known Men.” Jessi Jezewska Stevens reviews the Belgian writer and psychoanalyst’s three newly translated stories, “under the title We Were Forbidden.”

Beck and Call: ⚣ Where Readers Meet Writers: Likable/Unlikable Characters – “Michael Cunningham has a thing for beautiful gay young men who can’t quite seem to find their place in life”, observes Christine Beck, who makes her case in this review of his 2010 literary novel By Nightfall, a story of an apparently stable heterosexual marriage thrown into disarray by the arrival of the wife’s much younger brother.

The Times (via Archive Today): Iris Murdoch’s Irish side — a creepy gothic romance by the sea – “The author’s 1963 novel, The Unicorn, tells the surreal story of a woman trapped in a grand house above the cliffs of Co Clare.” Emily Formstone reveals The Times was “mystified” when it was first published.

Books & Victorians: 🚶‍♀️‍➡️ A Book Lover’s Walk – Victorianist, reader, writer and flâneuse Despina Kay has spent many happy hours exploring the streets and medieval corridors of Paris. She shares here one of her favourite walks, which takes in five English‑language bookshops over a distance of 2.5 miles / 4.0 km. Should this take your fancy, she suggests you “bring a tote bag or two” and “allow yourself three or four hours plus a lunch break.”

Palatinate: 🤖 Ghost in the machine: finding meaning in AI writing – “Are we tired of humanness?” Stella Fenwick dives into the algorithms and imitations of AI generated literature.

Queensland Reviewers Collective: 🦘 Every Wild Soul by Katherine Johnson – “Readers with more than the slightest interest in Nature will love this book”, says Ian Lipke in his review of Every Wild Soul, Katherine Johnson’s Tasmania-based novel that “raises important issues about development and conservation together with unintended consequences that can occur.”

The Observer: Reclaiming the story of Africa – “Luke Pepera’s rich and revelatory Motherland is a millennia-spanning history of the continent that breaks the grip of colonial narratives”, writes British-Nigerian journalist, academic and (soon to be) novelist Seun Matiluko.

The Broken Compass: ⚢ The writer’s bookshelf: Lucy Allen Goss – In the latest interview in this ongoing series, Mathew Lyons invites writer, gardener and medievalist Lucy Allen Goss – author of Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance – to answer eight questions about writers, books and reading.

The Dallas Morning News: Review: New biography of Larry McMurtry reveals much about elusive writer’s life – Joyce Sáenz Harris reviews Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, David Streitfeld’s new biography of the celebrated American novelist, essayist, screenwriter and antiquarian bookseller, widely remembered for his Pulitzer Prize‑winning novel Lonesome Dove.

Rights in Russia: Teresa Cherfas reviews ‘The Disappearing Act’ by Maria Stepanova – In Maria Stepanova’s first work of fiction, The Disappearing Act (translated by Sasha Dugdale), “we are first introduced to the novelist M sitting on a train, travelling from one unnamed country to another. Except that the train has been halted, for no reason apparent to her, in an unfamiliar landscape, suspended in time.” Teresa Cherfas reviews a book she describes as “a meditation on identity, personal and communal shame and responsibility.”

John Paul Brammer: 📖 How I Learned to Read Way, Way More – “I had to rethink my relationship to attention”, says John in this piece offering both a prognosis and a potential cure for literary rumination.

The Conversation: The hidden history of Wales and the Jewish world – Nathan Abrams’ new book, Jews in the Welsh Imagination Medieval Times to the Present, “uncovers how Jews, Judaism, Israel and Palestine have played a far greater role in Welsh history and imagination than many realise. In fact,” he maintains, “they have helped shape ideas of nationhood, identity and belonging over centuries.”

Publishing Perspectives: 🚫 Who Gets to Disagree? – “Frankfurt Calling’s John Steinmark on how ‘the language of freedom’ has been hijacked by an array of reactionary political actors—and how young voices in the publishing industry are organizing to push back.” He asks here: if we have the freedom to disagree, then “who, exactly, gets to exercise that freedom”?

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: Fearcatcher’s Naira Kuzmich: A Woman Brave Enough to Tell the Story – Fearcatcher, Naira Kuzmich’s posthumous debut novel, “is no ordinary tale”, writes Arpi Sarafian. “It is the story of generations of fearcatching families in Armenia trusted with dispelling the fears of their communities” – an “age-old tradition” whereby they conduct “an ancient folk healing ritual to cure both emotional and physical trauma by taking the fear out of the afflicted person.”

Writer’s Digest: 🐶 Camille Perri: I Wasn’t Sure if I Would Ever Write a Novel Again – “In this interview, author Camille Perri discusses reworking a script and turning it into her new novel, Social Animals”, says Robert Lee Brewer. You can also read a transcript of a conversation between the author and Alafair Burke in CrimeReads: Camille Perri and Alafair Burke on Dog Park Culture, Friendship, and Mystery.

ASAP Review: Breaking the Back of the Classics: Fanbinding and the Beautiful Book – “Featuring attractively bound copies of the English literary canon”, the Penguin Clothbound Classics series offers “affordable collectibles with a clear aesthetic formula: linen hardcovers, overlaid with a single‑color foil stamp.” Caroline Bailey and Luca Messarra explore this “affordable alternative to fine press editions, for those interested in collecting but without a massive budget.”

The Ink-Stained Desk: 🫣 Sad Girl Horror: Melancholy and Monstrosity – Sad Girl Horror is “a genre where the horror manifests from the protagonist’s internal rot.” In this month’s issue of Genre Genealogy, Christine Maree Reid “[wrestles] with a recurring question: Is Sad Girl Horror a trope, or is it a genre?” and asks, “Where does the Sad Girl fit into our literary considerations?”

EcoLit Books: 🧪 Translating Pavlov – “Dr. Ivan Pavlov is one of the most popular scientists of all time [and] yet little is known about the man and his work” – which is partly because of “poorly translated text,” says John Yunker. However, if you would “like to learn more [about this Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and his experiments with dogs, he] first recommends two resources: […] Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science by Daniel P. Todes and the online exhibit Kingdom of Dogs.” To delve deeper, he suggests Pavlov on the Conditional Reflex: Papers, 1903–1936, translated by Olga Yokoyama.

Read and Think Deeply: 📖 How To Move From Consuming Books to Thinking Deeply – “How do we develop the ability to expand our worldview and develop our own ideas from the books we read, [especially if we have difficulty remembering] what we have read?” asks Ryan Hall. He attempts to explain how we might “stop and process the ideas we encounter”.

Newsroom: 🎨 Keely: portrait of the artist – “There are good book covers and there are bad book covers and then there are book covers made by Keely O’Shannessy”, says Steve Braunias. “Five authors thank [New Zealand’s] most artistic book cover designer, Keely O’Shannessy,” who passed away from cancer earlier this month.

Nippon.com: A Strange Twist of Fate: Translating Uketsu’s Eerie Worldview into English – “The masked mystery creator Uketsu has successfully made the leap from internet success to bestselling numbers in the Japanese book world—and now in multiple languages overseas. His English translator Jim Rion writes about his discovery of the author and YouTube star and what his works have to offer.”

Caught by the River: Up All Night – Imogen Willetts’s “jaunty, jam-packed and dynamic history”, Up All Night: A History of Going Out “is the story of the good times and the great ones”, which “tracks a long arc of big nights out by selecting a chronological series of maximally creative highpoints, across the centuries and from across the world”, says Emma Warren.

Necessary Fiction: 🦘 The Endling – “In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling.” Noelle McManus reviews Keely Jobe’s The Endling, an “immersive and sweltering novel,” set in a “commune of women […] who’ve left society with the goal of creating their own” on an isolated mountaintop.

Literary Hub: 🤒 Undiscovered Country: The 100th Anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill” – American writer and educator Darcey Steinke, author of This Is the Door: Notes from a Body in Pain discusses “chronic pain, loneliness, and the truth of Woolf’s work”.

Subtle Maneuvers: ✍ The best book on writing I’ve ever read – Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is, says Mason Currey, “a slender […] guide for writers of personal narrative”, one that teaches us how to read and how to recognise truth when we hear it – in the writing of others and, just as crucially, in our own.

Cairo Scene: 📚 The Rooms We Build for Books: Modern Libraries of the Middle East – “From Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, these libraries show how reading spaces are being reimagined across the region.”

The Joy of Old Books: Grumbles, Gossip and Green Fingers – My Favourite Fictional Gardeners – Harriet finds that gardeners in fiction tend to be “stubborn, irascible, hot-tempered”, frequently Scottish men – using Mr McGregor from Peter Rabbit as an example of the stereotype. She offers further instances of this nature in her entertaining piece on green‑fingered literary characters.

Prospect (via Archive Today): The state of cli-fi – “Climate fiction, the subgenre of novels responding to the Anthropocene moment, would appear to be in rude health.” Nonetheless, what Susie Mesure would really like to know is whether “novels about the climate emergency [can] offer hope for a better tomorrow?”

A Narrative Of Their Own: ✍️ Writing Rituals of Shirley Jackson – In the latest installment of Kate Jones’s series on the “What, Where and Why of Literary Women”, she scrutinises the writing habits of American novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson, who is best remembered for “writing stories of psychological horror and Gothic fiction” – often featuring  “lost and lonely women who wish to escape their family lives or the communities they find themselves living amongst.”

The Irish Times (via Archive Today): Russian author Jana Bakunina: ‘In the West, people don’t know what it’s like to be absolutely helpless’ – “The exiled Russian writer, [author of The Good Russian: In Search of a Nation’s Soul], talks [to Patrick Freyne] about the ‘inner emigration’ of her friends under Putin and how even her father accepted regime propaganda”.

Publishers Weekly: 🍁🛸 Emily St. John Mandel’s Warring Worlds – The Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s new science fiction novel, Exit Party, set in 2031 after the violent dissolution of the United States, reflects her anxieties about the state of American democracy.

The Marginalian: How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged – Maria Popova writes wonderfully of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Book of Birds – “a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode […] addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object.” 

Reactor: 🦄 Eight Overlooked Characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books – “Everyone loves the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat,” says Kelly Robinson, “but what about these weird and wonderful creations?”

Engelsberg Ideas: Who really was Mackenzie King, the maker of modern Canada? – Yuan Yi Zhu on The Enduring Riddle of Mackenzie King (edited by Patrice Dutil), “a new collection of essays [which] revisits the life of a séance-holding Presbyterian bachelor whom historians routinely rank as Canada’s greatest prime minister, yet [also] largely [ignore].”

Anthony Burgess News: Shooting the Canon – Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, first published in 1984, “is the work of a prolific and outspoken critic” – and “despite its omissions, [his selection] is a joy to engage with […] because it is composed by a singular mind, replete with foibles, preoccupations and individuality, resulting in a list with wild swings and some provocative inclusions by well-known writers.”

Salvation South: In the South You Tend Your Garden – “Forty years ago, novelist Nancy Lemann covered a Louisiana governor’s corruption trial by ignoring everything journalism told her to do. Her story’s revival says it’s time to make journalism literary again”, writes Spencer George in this piece about her magnum opus The Ritz of the Bayou.

BBC Suffolk: 💘🦄 Romantasy book club helping rural readers connect – Alice Cunningham finds that “getting lost in the world of dragons, faeries and demons is not the only benefit to being part of a new romantasy book club, according to avid readers.”

Open Culture: 🧙‍♂️🍻 When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961) – “When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid‑1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews.” In particular, the Nobel prize jury “excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration” – with Anders Österling commenting that his prose had “not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”

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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

Tags: African Literature, Anita Kreituse, Anne Frank, Audiobook Appreciation Month, Australian Literature, Camille Perri, Cat Literature, Chantel Acevedo, Dog Literature, Emily St. John Mandel, Iranian Literature, Jacques Barzun, Keely Jobe, Lafcadio Hearn, Luke Pepera, Mahvash Sabet, Persian Literature, Reading the Meow 2026, Science Fiction, Sofia Montrone, Summer Solstice, Winter Solstice