An end of week recap

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
– Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

It is Bowdler’s Day, when we honour the man behind a notorious literary tidy‑up – a reminder that one well‑meant edit can slip, so easily, into cultural mischief. Then on Sunday we can honour Malala Yousafzai by reading one of her books for Malala Day.

Please cut the birthday cake for Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora (1561), American writer E.B. White (1899), English children’s writer Helen Creswell (1934), Indian-born novelist Amitav Ghosh (1956), British-American author Jhumpa Lahiri (1967), Korean-American author Min Jin Lee (1968) and Chinese-American SFF author Marie Lu (1984). You can clear the crumbs and serve jelly with ice cream on Sunday for American naturalist, writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817), Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (1892), Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904), Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih (1929), American crime fiction writer Donald E. Westlake (1933), Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury (1948), American novelist and short story writer Adam Johnson (1967) and American writer of paranormal romance Amanda Hocking (1984).

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 Bookcellar * 

Retrieved from our archival underbelly this week: (1) Recently added to our subterranean shelves is the review of Ingrid Horrocks’ short‑story collection about “women across different generations”, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, by historical novelist, book critic, trail runner and New Zealander Cristina Sanders. Ranging from the tale of a character “chasing stolen silver on the Norwegian coast in 1795 via a Berlin nightclub in 2005 to a [contemporary] woman who visits her son in prison,” she greatly enjoyed this “elegantly constructed” title, describing the author as “the queen of ‘show don’t tell’.” She especially liked the story ‘Evie on a Branch’, in which the protagonist “returns to the family farm [after] WWI”, having served in Amiens. Her disabled brother had remained at home due to being injured, so she is “careful with his feelings, [playing] down her war” despite being proud of her achievements – one of many in this collection that asks the simple question: “How do I, as a woman, negotiate communication with men?” To discover why Cristina considers herself “the perfect audience for this book”, please head on down to All Her Lives – book review. (2) Back in January, Sandra Danby took a pleasant bookish trip to the Dalmatian coast in her review of The Croatian Island Library by Welsh Cornwall-dweller Eva Glyn. One beautiful summer, “three strangers sail a catamaran around the […] Croatian islands near Dubrovnik” on a “mission […] to bring [a floating] library […] to the islands’ children.” Each member of the crew is apparently, “running from something, a problem, a secret, a hidden past”, and the reader accompanies them on a ten-week venture that will change all their lives. Set sail for #BookReview ‘The Croatian Island Library’ by Eva Glyn, where Sandra will introduce you to the stunning coastline and the characters on this pleasurable voyage of discovery.

* 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 all the more difficult to pick only this one – posted in the last few weeks:

Book Review: The Coast of Everything – Over at neverimitate, Jackie Law picks up on The Coast of Everything, the second novel by Executive Editor of Exacting Clam Guillermo Stitch. An “epic puzzle of nested stories that segue one to another without any need to reach a denouement before the next begins”, this “long and layered book” has no real start or end but is filled with “many literary and artistic references” – though it is unnecessary “to pick up on these” to follow the narrative. It “opens with a poem”; a tale is told of a daughter’s devotion to her father; a dead but smelly Charles Dickens is reanimated; there is a deal of heavy drinking… and all the while “[o]dd tropes recur for reasons that are rarely explained yet fit within context.” While Jackie considers Stitch’s sex scenes “so over the top they cheapen the act” and the characters often frustrate her, she nevertheless finds the author’s “imagined worlds […] interesting creations” since they “contain elements […] inspired by contemporary events and behaviours”. Indeed, his storytelling gives her “much to ponder.”

* 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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Independent (via Archive Today): 🎤 Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens: The devastatingly relatable novel every new mum needs to read – “Lisa Owens’ latest novel takes us inside a mum of two’s fraught final day of maternity leave. Jessie Thompson, who returned from her own mat leave this year, talks to her about the wild ride that is 24 hours with a small child – and how she managed to capture it so perfectly”. Natural Disaster is also reviewed by Diana Evans in The Guardian: Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens review – the last day of maternity leave is a comic rollercoaster. 

EL PAÍS: 🎤 Valeria Luiselli, writer: ‘Not to succumb to the temptation of catastrophe is also a political stance’ – With the book due to be published this month, it seemed an ideal moment to revisit Iker Seisdedos’s April interview with Valeria Luiselli in which “The Mexican author reflects on memory and imagination in Beginning Middle End, a novel that explores alternative narrative forms — from the visual to the auditory — through the story of several generations of women and their encounter with Greco-Roman classics and the volcanic landscape of Sicily”. For a recent (if shortish) review of the book, please see About the Book: Beginning Middle End at Bookreporter.

Literary Britain: ✈️ East Enders – You are invited to “take a look at the map” compiled here, where, if you “Zoom in on London […] you will see that it is the area with the densest population of literary landmarks of anywhere in the world.” Many “writers […] made their home in the East End”, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe, Anna Barbauld, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Cecil Day Lewis, though “memento literati [tend to be] noticeable by their absence.”

The New York Review (via Archive Today):🗼🍷🥐💘 On the Precipice – “Critics who call André Breton’s [Surrealist romance] Nadja a novel miss its most innovative aspects”, writes Susan Rubin Suleiman. First published in 1928 – now translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti – she says it has been “a long wait” for this “much more readable and accurate rendering” to appear in English.

The Tearoom: 🎤 Tea with Elizabeth O’Connor, Author of ‘Whale Fall’ – Mariella chats to Elizabeth O’Connor about “the real islands that inspired Whale Fall, the role of Welsh language and folklore in the novel, and why historical fiction remains such a powerful way of bringing overlooked lives into focus.”

NB: ⚢ Where You Go, I Will Go, Christina Fonthes – With the recent publication in paperback of British‑Congolese author Christina Fonthes’ debut Where You Go, I Will Go, it is worth directing you not only to this Alice Calcraft piece but also to two Brittle Paper features devoted to this lesbian title: Excerpt: Where You Go, I Will Go by Christina Fonthes (introduced by Jagravi Dave) and Congolese Identity and The Burden of Silence: A Review of Where You Go, I Will Go by Jai Deans.

Closely Reading: 📖✍ 5 essential works of literary criticism – In her latest newsletter, English Major Haley Larsen shares a list of “essential” books about literary criticism. “Whether you’re building a home library with a dedicated scholarly shelf, heading back to school this fall, or simply curious about the books that have shaped generations of readers”, there will, she assures us, be “something here for you.”

Quill & Quire: 🍁 Library of Brothel – Steven W. Beattie tells us that Anakana Schofield’s new novel, Library of Brothel, which is set in a utopian library housed in a “sprawling, late 19th century edifice [made up of] a haphazard collection of rooms” in a nameless city where nobody works, may have “no plot to speak of”, but it has nonetheless been described as one of “her most inventive, funniest, and boldest” works to date. You may also enjoy reading Marisa Grizenko’s critique of the title in the Literary Review of Canada: Lone Ranger: How Anakana Schofield stacks up. Additionally, our very own Marcie McCauley of Buried in Print wrote an excellent piece about it for The British Columbia Review: Giraffeify. Byelaws. Full-stops. 

Tokyo Weekender: 🏖️ 10 Japanese Books To Read This Summer – “As the days stretch long in Tokyo, hazy and thick with humidity, it may be time to (finally) tackle your New Year’s resolution — reading more and scrolling less.” Eugenie Shin has plenty of suggestions, from “chilling murder mysteries to glittering seaside tales”. Here, she says, you will find some of the best “translated Japanese reads to get lost in this season”.

Three for Opening Night: 🎨👩‍🎨
The Irish Times (via Archive Today): Sara Baume: ‘You realise who you actually want to have around as you age’ – “The author’s new book centres on her friendship with the artist Mollie Douthit, which became central to her life in an unexpected way”, says Sinéad Gleeson in her review of Opening Night – a memoir in which Mollie Douthit lives in quiet solitude, painting, in a remote cabin on the coast of West Cork. When Sara Baume discovers her work, a friendship blooms – forged over soup, swims in the ocean and long conversations about art, memory, and the rhythms of life.
Irish Examiner: 🎤 Author interview: Friendship, painting, and the art of spending time together – “Sara Baume speaks to Marjorie Brennan about her latest book, which explores the nature of modern relationships, the vagaries of a creative life, and what it means to truly belong”.
Literary Listings London: 🎤 10 Questions with Sara Baume – A brief Q&A with Sara Baume about her latest book and her “fascination with the work of the artist Mollie Douthit”.

Asian Review of Books: 🫣 “Shift” by Cho Yeeun – “At first, [South Korean author] Cho Yeeun’s Shift, recently translated by Yewon Jung, might be mistaken for a straight-up detective novel. But the whodunit premise is almost immediately disrupted as the story spirals into a thriller exploring the dark side of miracles.”

Personal Canon Formation: 🧙🍻 Tolkien’s Ents: Ecology Meets Philology – John Halbrooks discusses “everybody’s favorite deciduous character: Treebeard”, whom he describes as “[…] a central figure in LOTR [who] creates the connections that tie together a number of disparate aspects of the text (hobbits, Rohan, Fangorn) and Tolkienian interests (ecology, philology, deep history).” In the nick of time, only moments before posting this week’s wind up, I spotted this fabulous piece from Chris Lovegrove at Calmgrove: Treebeard’s ilk: #TalkingTolkien. It is well worth reading.

ArtReview: Shahrnush Parsipur, Persian literature’s uncompromising voice, 1946–2026 – “Shahrnush Parsipur, the Iranian novelist whose work transformed the female experience, history and magical realism into acts of political resistance, has died aged 80.”

La Bibliotrek | Read the World: ✈️ A Literary Tour Through the Streets of Prague – “Prague is one of Europe’s great literary cities […]. Literature here is woven into the very fabric of the streets: into Baroque reading rooms, historic cafés, independent bookshops and centuries-old neighbourhoods. From Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke to Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, generations of writers, artists and thinkers have drawn inspiration from Prague’s distinctive atmosphere. Here’s a curated walking tour through one of Europe’s most enchanting capitals.”

The Atlantic (via Archive Today): 📖 The End of Reading Is Here – “Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history”, says a depressingly pessimistic Rose Horowitch.

Mostly Books by Marcie Geffner: 🪖 Book Review: Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer – Marcie goes “inside the German city that first supported Hitler” via Katja Hoyer’s history Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

BBC Culture: 👁️ ‘His life was one of fantasy’: How John le Carré’s spy novels were shaped by his con-man father – “The author’s childhood was rocked by bankruptcy and deceit. In 2008, he told the BBC that his ‘hectic background’ trained him to be an author – and a spy”, reveals Fiona Macdonald.

Scroll.in: 🏖️ July Indian fiction: Six new novels that reimagine the Indian family and its stories – “A new novel by Booker Prize-shortlisted author Avni Doshi, a novel about a single father, a story set during Covid-19, and more.”

Book Beveling: Books if you are a language lover – “Anyone who has traveled internationally knows that culture and language are intertwined”, says high school librarian Kelly Mayfield. Here she shares “seven stories of language and culture” in one “perfect list for Substack.”

Transfer Orbit: 🛸 The Semisesquicentennial Man – “In January 1975, a science fiction fan […] approached author Isaac Asimov with an idea: the United States Bicentennial was approaching, and to celebrate the occasion, she proposed an anthology that was built around the idea of ‘The Bicentennial Man’. It would be edited by […] Forrest J. Ackerman, and it would contain stories from a whole bunch of other well-known authors.” Andrew Liptak on “Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, 50 years on”.

The Telegraph (via Archive Today): 🚫 Why both the Right and Left get freedom of speech wrong – “Everyone supports free speech – until someone says something they dislike. Anthropologist Matei Candea breaks it down into three main points” in his “richly provocative study”, Reason, Carnival and Honour: An Anthropology of Free Speech.

Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains: ⚣ More thoughts on E. M. Forster – Jonathan Bate on “closeted silence and an unwritten sequel”.

The Montréal Review: If You See the Translator, Don’t Shoot – Former NBCC board member and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing recipient Steven G. Kellman talks “cultural appropriation” and translation.

McNally Editions: 🗼🍷🥐 Éric Rohmer’s novel “Élisabeth” is finally here. – McNally Editions have announced the forthcoming publication of the first English translation of Élisabeth – “a portrait of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century as a young man”. Set in Paris on the eve of World War II, it was “the French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer’s only novel.”

The Saturday Paper: 🦘⚠️ Maria Takolander: The End of Romance – The End of Romance by Australian-Finnish author Maria Takolander is “a dystopian anti-love story set in a broken near future”, says James Bradley of this “brooding new novel”.

The Arts Fuse: Book Review: Beyond the Canon — How Cultural Authority Is Made – In Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look at, and Learn Peggy Levitt “maps the ‘inequality pipeline’ linking museums, publishing, and academia—and challenges the systems that shape what the world sees and reads”, writes Julie Trébault.

A Narrative Of Their Own: 🍁🦄 Short Story Salon – The latest essay in Kate Jones’ Short Story Salon series concerns Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, which “contains some beautifully constructed stories” focusing on “the intolerance of society toward those deemed ‘different’.”

Review 31: ☭✈️ An Old Master Too Large to Ignore – Joe Luc Barnes’ Farewell to Russia: A Journey Through the Former USSR “is a timely travelogue that explores what, if anything, still binds the ex-Soviet states together beyond ‘a tragic history and their use of the 1,520mm rail gauge.’ The book also offers a street-eye look at Russia’s recent foreign policy and what happened to its former empire, from independence until the invasion of Ukraine”, says WJ Davies.

African Film Press: 🎬 African Literary Adaptation: IP, Infrastructure, and Access – “The adaptation of African literature into film and television has been a feature of the continent’s screen ecosystems since the independence era. But who gets adapted — and why?” asks Tambay A. Obenson.

Notes from the Margins: 💘 The Cost of Unconditional Love – “Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights offer us […] insights into [the] stormy waters of love, presenting us with different versions of this time old tale, but perhaps circling the same question— what happens when you love someone so deeply that you begin to lose yourself?” Freyja explores what these two great classics can tell us about “losing yourself in another”.

The Orange County Register (via Archive Today): 🎤 ‘Stolen Revolution’ authors say Iranians will keep resisting harsh regime – “Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati convey the history of the country and its people through interviews and reporting” in Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran.

The Dickens Project: 📖 Why Read Dickens Today? – In this essay exploring the continued relevance of Charles Dickens, the case is made that a master storyteller with a keen eye for social justice still has much to offer contemporary readers. Here, we are presented with five compelling reasons to return to his novels in the 21st century.

The Hollywood Reporter: 🎬 “The Slovak Woody Allen,” an Orwellian Bistro and ‘Cupid at the Kremlin Wall’: Inside Book-to-Screen at KVIFF – “The [Czech Republic’s] Karlovy Vary film festival’s Industry Days strand for the first time showcased original literary IPs from Central and Europe that could lend themselves to film or TV adaptations.” Georg Szalai takes “a look at the eight pitches.”

The Dial: 🤖✍ ️Copyright Is Not Enough – Zoey Forbes looks at the reasons “why writers need new strategies to stand up to AI.”

AP: Hemingway’s masterpiece on Spain’s bull runs turns 100 years old with its allure intact – “Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises captivated generations of readers with its story of exotic travel and the pursuit of impossible love. A century after its publication, it’s still inspiring people to visit the Spanish city of Pamplona to take part in its yearly San Fermin festival of bull running. But Hemingway’s legacy of hyper-masculine prose, and the festival itself, have come under criticism from groups who say it’s time to leave them in the past.”

Nippon.com: 🕵️‍♀️ “Darkness”️ Kirino Natsuo’s Hard-Boiled Heroine Returns After 20 Years – “In her latest novel, Kirino Natsuo returns to the series her career began with, featuring the female detective Miro, after a gap of more than 20 years”, says Hatori Yoshiyuki.

Lapham’s Quarterly: An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day – “We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from ‘out of the blue,’ to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from the Muses or the gods. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by reasoning seldom command. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps because their origin remains something of a mystery.” In this piece adapted from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan looks at what “novelists can teach neuroscientists about consciousness”.

The Markaz Review: The Markaz Review suggests ten must-read books to accompany our Kurdish-themed issue. – “Kurdish literature, shaped by centuries of storytelling, remains under-explored by many international readers. Whether you are encountering Kurdish literature for the first time or seeking to deepen your engagement with it, these books offer compelling stories, distinctive voices, and invaluable insight into one of the world’s most enduring cultures.”

Parker’s Ponderings: 🛸 Was C.S. Lewis a Good Science Fiction Author? – “C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction. He also thought a lot about what makes for good science fiction. He [even] started his own science fiction trilogy”. But was he any good? According to Parker Settecase, “it depends…”

Australian Arts Review: 🦘 A room of their own: leading women writers take pride of place in Australia’s most popular rare book exhibition – “More than 120 titles by groundbreaking female authors, all acquired by the […] pioneering Women Writers Fund, [are] on display [in ‘World of the Book: The rare, the sacred and the iconic’, now open at State Library Victoria, Melbourne], many for the first time.”

Balkan Insight: 🚨 Czech Icon’s Legacy at Risk as Vaclav Havel Library Descends into Chaos – “As the widow of Czechia’s first president revokes her consent for his name to be used, the possible demise of the [Prague-based] Vaclav Havel Library has sparked a wider debate about how to approach the legacy of the democratic icon”, reports Jules Eisenchteter.

The Visible Reader: 🪖 What Anne Frank Taught My 9-Year-Old and Me About the Power of Literacy – “The decision [Michelle made to] take [her] 9-year-old daughter to ‘Anne Frank The Exhibition’ in Chicago was rooted in one hope: that she’d see how writing can endure, bear witness, and push back against evil.”

The Brooklyn Rail: 📖 Albert Mobilio’s Readings Against Type – “The strangeness—the thrill—I wrote, while reading Albert Mobilio’s Readings Against Type, of writing a literary review on a book of literary reviews”, a bemused Chris Campanioni remarks.

The Korea Herald: New book revisits French diplomat who helped introduce Korea to the West – “The French-Korean bilingual publication Victor Collin de Plancy: Entre France et Coree was released to shed light on the life of French diplomat Victor Collin de Plancy, one of the earliest Western figures to document and promote Korean culture”, reports Park Yuna.

The Baffler (via Archive Today): The Old Gods Return – “What did the ancient blood feuds and magical goats pulling a chariot across the sky have to offer postwar Europe?” asks Will McDonald. He seeks answers in two new collections, Out of the Darkness: Classic Short Fiction from Sweden and Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland, which he describes as “Fiction from the land of the ice and snow”.

The Art Newspaper: 🎨 Book reveals how Chintz—India’s precious textile pattern—became a precolonial global export – “This handsomely illustrated book, based on one of the world’s largest textile collections, sheds light on a little-understood category of global art: the intricate, astonishingly varied block-printed cloths that were designed in pre-modern India and sent out for over a thousand years on maritime trade routes to Japan, Indonesia, France and Britain”, says Cyrus Naji of Karun Thakar’s Chintz: Indian Cotton Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection.

Harper’s Magazine (via Archive Today): Backsliding: On the paradox of willpower – In an adaption from American writer and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn’s forthcoming memoir Will and Attention (in which she spends a year reading the work of Simone Weil), she reflects on alcohol addiction, the Catholic faith and a profound personal crisis.

The Joy of Old Books: 👦👧 Nine Children’s Books I Bet You Haven’t Read – Harriet writes: “The books on this list have two things in common; one, that I read them over and over as a child, and two, I have never found anyone with whom to discuss them, let alone seen them written about anywhere.” Did you enjoy any of these titles when you were growing up? If you did she would love to hear from you.

Dead Language Society: 🗣️ “Weird” is a weird word – “Weird is one of the most commonly used words in the English language” – in fact, we say it “all the time for the little everyday oddities we encounter” – but it “wasn’t always such a casual word.” Colin Gorrie traces its origins, following the journey from Old English wyrd to the modern sense of strangeness and everyday peculiarity.

3 Quarks Daily: ☭ The Nonsense World of Daniil Kharms – Anton Cebalo writes that Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) was “a strange man” for whom “absurdism was […] effectively realism”, a view he offers of the Soviet Russian avant-gardist, absurdist poet, writer and dramatist who was “persecuted for his involvement with the revolutionary group People’s Will”. You can discover more about him in the 2013 hotchpotch collection of works, “I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms (translated by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto).

The Reading List: 10 incredible classic novels set on islands – “[F]rom Mediterranean shores to faraway shipwrecks,” Chloe has put together a list of recommended “classic and modern classic […] must-reads” in her latest Sunday newsletter.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Archive Today): 🚫 Rebecca Tuvel Was Canceled. It Was the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Her. – “The philosopher reflects on public shaming and being a cautionary tale” in what became known as the “Hypatia affair”.

baddiemir nabokov: Books Are Handbags – “The best-designed books are, of course, handbags—that is, they perform the same accessorial function, observe similar rules: They look best heavily used, if not abused (nothing more humiliating than an uncreased Hegel or a pristine Balenciaga).” Writer Seth Wang on “why the Dalkey Essentials covers suck so hard. Plus: Is Fitzcarraldo *really* Bottega?”

The Comics Journal: 🎨✉️ R&R- Craft, Comics Art, The Enemy, and Me: Blood and Thunder Thirty Years Later – Canadian critic, archivist and zinemaker Helen Chazan recalls, “In the far flung past when written arguments took place through mailed correspondence over months and the online forums which corporate-hosted microblogging (social media) has replaced were still newborn, The Comics Journal had a letters column. That column was known as Blood and Thunder, and fittingly it was home to many a legendary row, of the sort that bring a nervous chuckle to even the most battle-scarred warrior of the livejournal-tumblr era.”

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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: Art Literature, Bowdler’s Day, Croatian Literature, Deborah Fallows, Eastern European Literature, Eva Glyn, Guillermo Stitch, Indian Literature, Ingrid Horrocks, Irish Literature, Joe Luc, Karun Thakar, Language, Lisa Owens, Malala Day, Michael Pollan, Mollie Douthit, New Zealand Literature, Russian Literature, Sara Baume, Virginia Woolf