An end of week recap
“I’ve never wanted anything but love. And literature.”
– Annie Ernaux (Getting Lost, 2001)
Next week’s wind up will be rather brief, I’m afraid. I am gadding off once again – this time to our mobile lodge in Mid Wales (fondly known to me and Mrs J as Middle‑earth) – and I won’t return until late on Friday 31st July. Under normal circumstances I might have postponed the post until the following week, but those who have followed me for any length of time will know that August is a particularly special month in my calendar. I shall say no more for now but promise to be more forthcoming in next week’s note (sadly, not a proper WUTW).
Moving on, we have yet another weekend of poor pickings for bookish and writerly commemorations; however, we can at least cheer ourselves up by helping our friends in the US celebrate National Wine and Cheese Day. 🍷🧀 Ditto the week ahead (but in the UK), National Marine Week 🪼 begins today and the Big Butterfly Count 🦋 is ongoing until 9th August (does this date ring any bells perchance?).
Among the very few literary folk born on this day are the Scottish author Josephine Tey (1896), Bulgarian modernist novelist, memoirist and non-fiction writer Elias Canetti (1905) and American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist and editor Leslie Scalapino (1944).🎈 While Sunday invites us to celebrate the births of Irish playwright, critic and polemicist George Bernard Shaw (1856), Spanish poet and leading figure of Generation of ’98 Antonio Machado (1875), French author André Maurois (1885), English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894), American novelist and short-story writer Paul Gallico (1897), Indonesian poet and member of the 1945 Generation Chairil Anwar (1922), Welsh novelist Bernice Rubens (1923), Pakistani novelist and poet Ibne Safi (1928), Scottish thriller novelist and screenwriter Ian Mackintosh (1940) and British journalist, screenwriter, film producer and novelist Nicholas Evans (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.
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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.
* 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 these two – posted in the last week or so:
BOOK REVIEW: Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth – “81-year-old Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is not someone who blends in with the crowd”, says Emma in her review of Mad Mabel, by Melbournian author Sally Hepworth. At “6ft tall with broad shoulders, [this formidable, curmudgeonly old lady is] used to standing out”, though what her neighbours on Kenny Lane don’t realise is that she’s “Australia’s most notorious child killer” – that is, she was accused of this crime when herself a child. After sixty years of living quietly in the same suburb, her long‑buried secret is now at risk of becoming common knowledge. Emma likes a good anti‑hero and is a “sucker for a story with black humour,” and thankfully this “page-turner […] did not disappoint.” Please head over to Emma’s Biblio Treasures to discover why “there is so much more” to this mystery than you might expect.
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939 – Over at The Reading Bug, David looks back at a classic collection of six stories set in “early 1930’s Berlin, a city in transition from the ‘decadence’ of the Weimar Republic to the repression of the Nazis”, namely Goodbye to Berlin. Its author, Christopher Isherwood, claimed to be a “passive observer”, though to what extent this was true is “debateable”, since, as David astutely notes, “it is surely not possible to simply observe events without having some impact upon them.” He reminds us that the “novel opens in autumn 1930 with Christopher, an English writer, living in […] a boarding house” alongside an eccentric assortment of lodgers, including a prostitute and a yodeller, and it is at this time he meets the sexually adventurous Sally Bowles, an English actress who sings in a bar and becomes his friend. I suggest you settle in and let David share his perceptive thoughts in this engaging post.
* 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 happenings, please head over to Tove Telegraph. Don’t miss out on events happening near you! 🎩👜
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Laura Thompson’s Substack: 🕵️♀️🔎 My new book – Biographer Laura Thompson indulges in “a bit of shameless self‑promotion” – and why not? Agatha Christie’s eleven‑day disappearance in December 1926 is well known, but the reason for it has never been clear. Laura now offers “a new theory as to her motive, which to [her] mind fits what we know of the facts”, indeed she has uncovered “some intriguing pieces of information”, which to the best of her knowledge are “entirely new”. In her forthcoming book, Eleven Days: The Fascinating True Account of Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Disappearance, she strips away a century of myth‑making to imagine Christie as she was and retrace “the strange journey that she made” from Sunningdale to Newlands Corner and on to the Harrogate hotel where she was found.
PRoB: 📚 A Library on the Eve of Packing – “I often experience sadness when thinking that I may be among the last living individuals who endeavour to build a personal library of this scale, but I also remind myself that the personal library has always been an exceptional thing”, says bibliophile Ignacio Sánchez Prado in his essay reflecting on the act of collecting books.
The Art Newspaper: 🎨 How novelists continue to be inspired by artists – “Several books out this summer use art as a springboard” – Chloë Ashby spoke to “some of their authors”, including Alex Hyde about her “sharp and gritty new novel,” Exhibition, in which an “absorbing story of loss and possession unravels during the heady days of the Young British Artists (YBAs) in 1990s London.”
BookPage: 🏊 Midstream – In Midstream, Kate Washington’s memoir about turning 50, contemplating the end of her 23-year marriage and starting her 50 Dunks Project, the Northern California-based writer “chronicles her quest to immerse herself in 50 different natural bodies of water—and the self-discovery and acceptance she found along the way.” Sara Beth West declares it “perfect for anyone at midlife asking themselves: ‘Is this all there is?’”
Books in the Scullery: 🕵️♂️ Judging Harriet Vane – Jem Bloomfield scrutinises British crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison – book number six in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, first published in 1930. The story, he says, “opens rather oddly”, since instead of beginning with a crime, it starts as the “judge is summing up the evidence at the end of the trial.” He looks closely at this before “expanding on the idea” of this being a “novel of manners” and examining the rest of the book.
TLS (via Archive Today): 🦄 Goodbye Nordic cool – Compared by some to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Jorge Luis Borges, Swiss writer Christian Kracht’s Air (translated from the German by Daniel Bowles) is described by Ben Hutchinson as a “novel of memory in two and three dimensions”. In The New York Times’ article A Novel That Swerves From Quaint Cottagecore to Frenzied Fantasy, Charlie Lee calls it the story of “a decorator’s unusual commission [leading] abruptly into another universe”. It is, he says, “weird, messy [and] tonally incoherent — and yet eerily, unaccountably compelling.”
The Monthly (via Archive Today): 🦘📚 Self on a shelf – “Personal libraries provide a quieter glimpse into people’s hearts and minds than the frenetic whirl of social media postings”, observes Australian author Andrea Goldsmith.
Afrocritik: The Land Remembers: 20 African Environmental Novels of the Last Decade – “The environmental realities of Africa have been the subject of literary works from inception. Some of the most important African novels ever written have been about environmental issues”, writes Chimezie Chika.
Literary Hub: 🍁🦋 Welcome to Toronto, World Capital of the Urban Raccoon – “If you ask anybody in Toronto, they’ll tell you that raccoons […] are everywhere. The creatures have turned even the [greyest] urban spaces into wild landscapes […]. There is no part of the city that they can’t master—or at least that’s what people here believe.” Read an excerpt from Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World by Canadian epidemiologist and former musician Dan Werb.
Asian Review of Books: 🦄 “The Young Die Old” by Nguyễn Bình Phương – Vietnamese author Nguyễn Bình Phương’s second novel The Young Die Old, set in the mythic village of Phan, was first published “in 1994 to great acclaim in his homeland where it is considered a modern classic.” Finally available in English, it “concerns the rivalry [between] two families”, both vying for control of a mysterious treasure said to be buried beneath the land – and according to Andreas Pohl, it “presents a unique vision of the post-war period in Vietnam which is both illuminating and aesthetically challenging.”
BBC News: Unmasked: The autistic women authoring a better future – “Masking, camouflaging, trying to blend in – this is what women with autism have been practising to navigate a world that for decades did not even recognise their existence. Having finally been diagnosed as adults, many have taken to print to shed light on the reality, variety and complexity of these once hidden lives”, finds Federica Bedendo.
Read and Think Deeply: 📖 Building A Balanced Reading Life – Ryan Hall discusses balancing competing reading goals and considers “how to keep [a] reading life fresh”.
Beshara Magazine: An Island to Myself by Michael N. McGregor – Robert Hirshfield talks via Zoom to the author of An Island to Myself, “which explores the place of solitude in an active life” – in particular, the remote Greek island of Patmos.
London Review of Books: 🗼🍷🥖 Doctor of the Incurable – “Beyond the violence and immediacy of his language, perhaps Jean-Paul Marat was popular for a more straightforward reason: he gave his readers a plausible and often far-sighted account of what they were up against.” Oliver Cussen examines Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror by Keith Michael Baker and Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution by Thomas Crow.
Prospect (via Archive Today): 👦👧 Childhood’s standard bearer – Screenwriter, novelist and occasional actor Frank Cottrell‑Boyce – known for his children’s fiction and for his long‑standing collaborations with film director Michael Winterbottom – has a new book out. A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now is “at once an elegy for the lost pleasures of youth and an optimistic prospectus for their return”, writes Lucy Lethbridge.
Salon: 📚 How owning books became everybody’s business – Andi Zeisler thinks “the number of books you have, and the way you shelve them, invites judgment”. Are you preoccupied with what others have on their shelves?
C-Ville: 🎨✍️🦋 Lara Call Gastinger’s guide to viewing nature – Artist and botanical illustrator Lara Call Gastinger’s new book, A Perpetual Journal Practice: Building a Connection with Nature through Art, “is an accessible and inspirational guide for those interested in starting their own”, says Sarah Lawson, who invites readers to begin a perpetual art journal layered with small, attentive observations gathered through the turning of the year – a practice that deepens one’s connection to the natural world and encourages creativity to unfold at its own pace.
Quill & Quire: 🍁 July marks Margaret Laurence centenary – “Margaret Laurence, the celebrated novelist and foundational figure of modern Canadian literature who brought Prairie life to the page in her five-book Manawaka cycle […], would have turned 100 years old this month”, writes Cassandra Drudi. In addition, Brian Busby of The Dusty Bookcase looks back at many of Laurence’s books (apparently “a lightning rod for censors”) in Margaret Laurence: 100 Years.
Dear Head of Mine: 📕📘📗 Literary Sequels: Do We Want Them? – What is a literary sequel, asks Sean deLone? He attempts to answer the question by looking to works by Margaret Atwood and Colson Whitehead, concluding that “by and large readers want new [and] original” literary fiction, even from the authors they know and love.
Financial Times (via Archive Today): 🛸 The Mulai — an extraplanetary experiment in language and identity – The Mulai, Spanish writer Munir Hachemi’s second novel to be translated into English (by Julia Sanches) is, says Max Liu, a “work of science fiction, […] set more than a century in the future on an unnamed planet where the eponymous Mulai community live and worship a deity, comically named ‘Dog’.” It is a “playful, hedonistic [story about] descendants of colonisers from Earth” and “offers a daring exercise in translation”.
Jane Austen’s Niece: Caroline Jane Knight: What Did Jane Austen Die Of? – “The answer is lost to history — for now. So, the question [Ms Knight is] really asking is how hard we should try to find out.” She seeks your help hoping to ascertain “whether it matters that we cannot say [how she died], and how hard, and by what means, we ought to try”.
Newsroom: 📚 Publishers ‘self-sabotaging’ NZ books – Bookshops in New Zealand “are unable to get in stock fast enough to satisfy customer demand because most books, […] are held in warehouses […] in Australia. Steve Braunias reports on an “investigation into the biggest threat facing NZ bookstores”.
The Library of Lewis and Tolkien: 📖🦁 How to Read Like C.S. Lewis – “C.S. Lewis was a “perceptive and subtle reader, with an acute sensitivity to details.” He was also an immensely generous reader, “wide-ranging in his sympathies” and “ideas [that] have a great deal to teach us today”. Here Joseph McLaurin Leake summarises what he considers to be Lewis’s “most valuable insights” to help others “derive greater benefit from [their own] reading”.
Le Monde (via Archive Today): 🗼🍷🥖 Albert Camus archives, including manuscripts, forged documents and letters, join national collection – “The archives [spanning 50 meters and including 260 boxes or crates], previously kept within the writer’s family, has been acquired by France’s national library for €9 million with support from Hermès and CIC”, says Fabienne Darge.
nellreadsbooks: Italy in books – Nell is in Sicily “manifesting spritzes, sunshine and swimming,” and in the spirit of her sun‑soaked holiday she shares a list of her “favourite books set in Italy – both translated and not.” The featured title is Elsa Morante’s 1957 coming‑of‑age novel Arturo’s Island (translated by the marvellous Ann Goldstein) – “about a teenage boy called Arturo who finds himself falling for his young stepmother”.
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): 🪖 A glimpse into the infidelity and blackmail that beset Blitz-ravaged London – Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer “Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 masterpiece The Heat of the Day reflects a changing society, especially in terms of sexual mores”, says Simon Heffer. He looks back at this “superb” work in which Bowen told “truths about life in her writing that were inaccessible to the cinema” because of censorship.
The British Columbia Review: 🍁✈️ ‘Sticking with things Canadian’ – In Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis: Tales from Canada & Elsewhere, the award‑winning travel writer and novelist Will Ferguson sometimes “questions the whole notion of Canadianness […], at others he makes it sound like the country is more than a miscellany, more a unified collection, unified by hockey perhaps.” Sheldon Goldfarb finds things to like – and some to frustrate – in this collection of previously unpublished essays.
Parker’s Ponderings: 🎓🧙🦄 Defense Against The Dark Arts: The Philosophy of Wizards – Parker Settecase is currently “teaching a course on the philosophy and theology of C.S. Lewis”, but he’s already contemplating a follow‑up on “the philosophy of wizards.” After all, wizards and sorcerers “aren’t just the subject matter of fantasy novels, they have real historical antecedents and precedents”, so his defence against the dark arts course would “touch on all the theories of magic […] and delve into the wizards of history and fiction”. He shares a suggested list of reading materials – take a look and let him know if this interests you.
Prototypes, tools & experiments: 🛠️ Large Learning Models: why conversations with LLMs are an education in themselves – The Guardian’s Chris Moran explains how “an idle conversation with [his] daughter led to PlotLines, a beautiful tool to map novels, and why the tool itself is less important than the conversations [they] had with the machine that built it.”
Slate (via Archive Today): 🗼🍷🥖 Toward a Theory – “Emily Eakin’s exquisite new book [The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory] tackles a subject that was all the rage in the ’80s and ’90s: French philosophers”, writes Laura Miller.
Realnoe Vremya: 🦄 Earth, speak! A story about femicide in Argentina – The Earth Eater by Dolores Reyes (translated by Julia Sanches) is “one of the major books about violence against women in contemporary Latin America”, in which “social reality combines with elements of mystical vision to give a voice to those who remain silent”, says Ekaterina Petrova.
The Collector: 𖣐🪓𖤍 The Real Identity of Grendel and the Monsters of Beowulf – “The Old English epic poem Beowulf is a classic story of darkness and light. Sinister, inhuman forces are portrayed as locked in battle with the forces of humanity and virtue. Yet, the monsters are more than just fantastical foes. They represent vices that are all too human, and they provide us with a deep insight into how the early-medieval mind viewed good and evil.” Calvin Hartley attempts to understand these “forces of darkness”.
BBC Coventry & Warwickshire: ✍️ ‘I made Virginia Woolf’s idea for women a reality’ – Sian Filcher writes: “Sitting in her idyllic garden in Clifford Chambers, just two miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, 85-year-old Sarah Hosking reflects on a journey that has been in the works since she was 20. After reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, she became inspired to make it a reality”. This she achieved – and then some. You can read about it in her new biography Five Pounds For ‘A Room Of One’s Own’: Where Women May Write Exactly What They Think.
Literary Hub: ✍️🗼🍷🥖 A Dialogue With the Facts: On Writing Literary Biography in a Post-Truth Age – “Where does the ‘literariness’ in literary biography belong? With the book’s subject—or its author?” Fiona Sampson, author most recently of Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand,” explores the ways we can blend reality with fictionalization”.
Language Arts: 🎤 The Canon is elastic – Sophia June speaks to Thomas Gebremedhin, Vice President and Executive Editor at Doubleday about the launch of Outsider Editions, a reissue series devoted to bringing renewed attention to what he calls “acclaimed but neglected” works in the literary canon by the likes of Shiva Naipaul, Kate Braverman, George Lamming, Said Makdisi and Han Ong. “Rediscovery doesn’t happen by accident,” he tells Sophia. “Books return to public life because people fight for them.”
Aeon: 🛸 The looting of science fiction – “Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future”. Ali Rıza Taşkale asks, “Who benefits? Who pays the cost? What was left behind in the looting?”
Beck and Call: ⚢📜🪶 Where Readers Meet Writers: Is Mary Oliver embarrassing? – “Comparing Oliver to Rainer Maria Rilke[!]”, exclaims Christine Beck. She takes issue with Maggie Millner, whose Yale Review piece last year – titled Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing? – accused the American Pulitzer‑winning poet of being “trite” and “vastly uneven in quality, demonstrating little thematic or stylistic growth over the long arc of her career.” Au contraire, says Christine: Oliver is “not embarrassing”, and it is instead “sad to think that ‘one’s wild and precious life’ may [be considered] trite simply because it is used so frequently.”
The Global New Light of Myanmar: 📖 Beyond Borders: Why Young People Should Read Translated Literature – “In an increasingly interconnected world, translation is more than the conversion of words from one language into another”, says Maung Maung Myint Thein. “Young readers stand to benefit enormously from translated literature.” In fact, “a nation that invests in translation invests in its future.”
The Duck-Billed Reader: Charles Dickens’s First-Person Narrators – “Although Bleak House deserves its reputation as one of Dickens’s greatest novels, this post will focus on the dismay that many feminist readers […] experience as they encounter Esther.” Here, Claire Laporte “explains this dismay by comparing Esther with David and Pip, Dickens’s other first-person narrators.”
EcoLit Books: 🦘🛸 Book Review: The Thinning, by Inga Simpson – “Set in Australia after a major extinction event,” The Thinning by the acclaimed author Inga Simpson is a dystopian novel exploring what happens when the human population is “reduced to such a degree that females from age ten up must be micro‑chipped so the state can record their cycles [and they are forced to take part in] a program to save the species”, says JoeAnn Hart.
Reason: 📖 Reading: The Quietest Way To Disobey – Joel Miller suggests that “today’s anxieties about digital culture are prefigured in the long and wobbly history of books”, in his review of Joel Halldorf’s exploration of the power of reading, writing and books in helping us understand who we are: Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age. In an earlier review in Kirkus the book is described as “a welcome history of reading as a story of faith in the word and the self.”
The Dark Academicals Book Club: 🕯️💘 The Dark Academia urge to write for the applause in ‘When We Were Monsters’ by Jennifer Niven – “For the young writers of [Jennifer Niven’s] When We Were Monsters, creativity is not simply a means of expression. It is a competition. Their work is being watched, judged and measured against that of everyone around them, with the promise that one of them might emerge transformed: recognised, validated and finally allowed to believe that their dreams are worth pursuing.”
The Arts Fuse: ⚣📜🪶 Book Review: Chronicling a Life of Devotion and Disquiet – The American award-winning poet, fiction writer, teacher and author of two autobiographies Michael Klein’s “new essay collection weaves brushes with artistic giants into candid meditations on addiction, desire, and survival”, says Joan Frank. She declares Happiness Ruined Everything “dark, disturbing, wry, often wise, [and] a strange compendium, melding a bizarre range of experience in tones to match.”
Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains: The Poisoner and the Pen – Thomas Wainewright made a big impression on Wilde and Dickens – but was he really a murderer? Jonathan Bate examines the evidence.
The Kyiv Independent: 🪖 Russia’s large-scale attack destroys nearly 250,000 Ukrainian books – A recent Russian attack on Kyiv “destroyed nearly 250,000 books in Knyholove’s inventory,” reports Dmytro Basmat. The publishing house says it is “working ‘to restore all processes as quickly as possible’ while warning customers about ‘temporary’ shipping delays following the strike.”
Media Determinism: 📉 Will books make a comeback like vinyl? – Andrey Mir, author of The Digital Reversal, contends that “the digital divide was once social” but it is now shifting, and increasingly it “will be a cognitive divide.”
The Boston Globe (via Archive Today): ⚢💘 ‘The New People’ is a brash debut about economic collapse, marital woes, and the worst kind of neighbors – A “bold and twisting plot […] As impressive as Uptmor’s authorial daring with plot and characters is her rich setting, deploying all the details of life as we knew it in the year 2008 […] Uptmor has pulled off quite a coup in a debut novel. In a word: sold.” Marion Winik clearly enjoyed The New People, a thriller about a newly married lesbian couple who move into a renovated foreclosure, unaware that the former homeowners are still living in the attic.
BBC Culture: 🧺👗 ‘Books like this get people debating’: Why smash-hit tradwife satire Yesteryear is 2026’s most divisive book – Clare Thorp writes: “Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear is the book of the season – and quite likely the year, too. Here’s why this satirical novel about tradwives and womanhood in the US has everybody talking.” If you hop over to Chantel-LaVonne’s Substack, you can take a gander at a handy reading list selected by Chantel and TreNesha (of TreNesha Reads The Room): Where Do We Go From Here: A Reading Pathway Through Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.
Jeanette Winterson: ✍️ Mind Over Matter: Making it up as you go along. – Jeanette Winterson has been commissioned to write “the final episode of a 5-part radio story for BBC R4 Book at Bedtime slot.” This pleases her, although she doesn’t yet know how it will end. Not being “a writer who plans it all out beforehand” but preferring to look “for clues as [she goes] along”, she listens and learns – which leads her to digress and discuss the life missed when wearing headphones, writing “in colour even when it’s black and white”, how being a “human should be interesting” and much more besides.
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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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