An end of week recap
“Ah those days…for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.”
– J. L. Carr (A Month in the Country, 1980)
As prophesied in WUTW #482, this post is a little shorter than usual due to Mrs J’s riotous birthday celebrations, which will continue into next week with a few days in London. This, I’m afraid, means no further wind up until Saturday 19th September – from which point on I should have a clear diary for some time while we recover from nearly a fortnight of carousing. 🥴
It is now Read a New Book Month – an occasion for readers everywhere to sink into something new between the covers. National Read a Book Day, observed in Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA, kicks off tomorrow – as does Belarusian Written Language Day, when the nation honours its poets, writers and thinkers.
While we’re partying like it’s 2099, I would hate for you to miss out on any events of significance, so I can report that on 12th September it will be World Dolphin Day and German Language Day. Then, on Sunday 13th, it is Roald Dahl Day and International Chocolate Day, while Rosh Hashanah – marking the Jewish New Year – takes place from 11th to 13th.
Among those born on this day in history are Scottish poet Robert Fergusson (1750), Italian poet and writer Goffredo Mameli (1827), Austro-Hungarian author and journalist Arthur Koestler (1905), Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (1914) and American poet and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press Sam Hamill (1943). 🎁 Our first Sunday celebrants of the month include American writer and philosopher Robert Pirsig (1928), American writer living in France Julien Green (1900), Italian crime writer Andrea Camilleri (1925), Spanish poet Ángel González Muñiz (1925), American author Alice Sebold (1963), Scottish crime novelist Christopher Brookmyre (1968) and British speculative fiction writer China Miéville (1972).
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.
* Spanish Steps Through Literature *
In Literary Musings, her recent post at Thoughts on Papyrus, Anglo-Russian critic Diana remarks on how little literature from Spain she has read – not “Spanish-language authors, such as from Latin America,” but from the Kingdom of Spain itself. She recently read Tristana by the Spanish realist novelist and politician Benito Pérez Galdós (you can read her review here) but otherwise feels she’s “barely scratched the surface” of this country’s vast canon. In fact, she has “only recently discovered that [the nation boasts so very] many great books and hidden gems.” She goes on to mention several likely titles before suggesting the possibility of “a Spanish Literature Challenge,” in the same vein as the one she previously hosted on Italy. Would you be interested in participating in something of this sort? Please add your comments to the ongoing discussion under her post.
Since writing the above, Diana has decided to go ahead with The Reading Spain Challenge 2026-2027. “It will run until September 2027 (any number of books goes […]). The only rule is that authors must be from Spain (either born in Spain, nationality is/was Spanish, or who strongly identify(ed) with Spain […].” Please see The “Reading Spain” Challenge for all you need to know about taking part.
* 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 is 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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Financial Times (via Archive Today): 💔 Black September by Sandro Veronesi — a boy’s own story – At his family’s summer house in Tuscany, twelve-year-old Gigio Bellandi’s life begins to change. He discovers the adult pleasures of music and reading, starts to uncover who he is and begins to see his family through maturing eyes. Then, when Astel Raimondi enters his life, she changes him forever. “The multi-award-winning Italian writer [Sandro Veronesi] turns memory into drama in this warm, teasing account of an early-1970s adolescence”, says John Self of Black September (translated by Michael F. Moore).
A right pair of Christies: 🕵️♂️🔎
The i Paper: The hidden dark side of Agatha Christie – “When Cathy Rentzenbrink found herself drained by life’s upheavals, she turned to her first literary love – Agatha Christie – and unearthed the secrets of how the troubled writer survived personal crises and started life again”. Dale Shaw reviews the British memoirist’s new book, The Agatha Christie Cure: What Reading the Queen of Crime Taught Me About Life, in which she explores the many ways Christie’s problems so often reflect her own. Over at Bookish, Natasha Poliszczuk also shares her thoughts on this “delightful” book about books in What would Agatha do?.
Laura Thompson’s Substack: Anti-Desert Island Discs – Just for fun, Laua Thompson, whose latest book is Eleven Days: The Fascinating True Account of Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Disappearance (as reported in WUTW #478), picks the eight Christie novels that she “would leave behind”. In other words, “the ones that [she] would most easily live without” on her desert island.
Afrocritik: 💘👩🏿🍼 Maternal Disciple and Abandonment: A Review of “Rootless” by Krystle Zara Appiah – “Motherhood in African society is often portrayed as glorified exhaustion, endurance, and a revered maternal ability in literature. Mirroring this reality, African literature […] captures the endless requirements of being an African mother”, says Nusiroh Shuaib. “However, in Krystle Zara Appiah’s Rootless, this moral duty is disrupted with a startling simplicity: a mother leaves.”
Knowledge Lust: 📖🧠 Why deep read? – In an excerpt from his e-book, The Lifelong Learning Compass: How to Design a Well-Rounded Self-Education, Sam Rinko discusses building “a formidable mind” through deep reading – an ability he describes as “increasingly rare”.
The Bookseller (via Archive Today): 🦘 Gothic Australian ‘masterpiece’ finds new life at Virago – “Set on a remote Australian farm, [Elizabeth Jolley’s] The Well centres on the claustrophobic relationship between two women: eccentric, middle-aged Hester and Katherine, the volatile young woman she brings into her isolated existence.” First published in 1986, this haunting tale will be republished by Virago later this month – complete with “a new introduction by bestselling novelist Alice Slater.” You may also be interested in reading Unearthing the Terror in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, a feature in which “Graeme Karstaedt reflects on this Australian classic” for the digital arts magazine Seesaw.
Full Stop: ☭ The Twenties – Varlam Shalamov – It is difficult not to see the Russian writer, poet and Gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov’s The Twenties (translated by Cathy Porter) “as a monument to a bygone era, [for when he wrote this memoir in 1962 most of] the people [mentioned had] already died and a significant number of them […] perished during the Stalinist terror”, observes Konstantin Mitroshenkov. But what a cast of people… Viktor Shklovsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Andrei Belyi, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Mikhail Bulgakov – to name but a few. However, it “has every chance [of accomplishing] what the Russian original [was unable to do due to] censorship. [It introduces its readers] to a vibrant cultural period [and offers] surprises and insights for those willing to brush history against the grain.”
London Review of Books: 📜🪶✍️ Good Weird or Bad Weird – “What’s the point of literary criticism?” In his review of the late Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays, Colin Burrow writes: “Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile.”
The Cut (via Archive Today): 🎤🍁🫣 The Postpartum-Psychosis Novel Is Here – “In Queen Mab, [Canadian author] Emily McBride’s excellent debut novel, Maddie, a 20-something grad student in an unnamed English city, becomes pregnant” and is filled with hope for the future. “But after the baby comes, something sinister grips her daily life”. Is it possible her little girl is a fairy child, swapped when she wasn’t looking? Madeleine slips ever further into violent visions. Sarah Wheeler speaks to McBride about madness, motherhood and myths.
Metropolis: All Time Best Japanese Fiction Books – “From untouchable classics to the severely underrated” with Paul Park.
Reading the Past: 🍂 A preview of fall 2026 in historical fiction – “Fall is the big season in book publishing, and when it comes to historical fiction, readers have much to look forward to,” says academic librarian Sarah Johnson. In her latest list of “upcoming historical novels, [she includes the titles] that interest [her] personally” – eighteen of them on this occasion.
Platform: The Imitation Englishman – Devki Pande’s debut, The Imitation Englishman, “revolves around a young Indian clerk who travels to Heidelberg to study law, only to find himself drawn into the Hindu-German Conspiracy, a gun-running plot for Indian independence that takes him from Germany to London”, says Neeraja Srinivasan. It is, she continues, “a facet of Indian history that has never really been explored in fiction before.”
Fansplaining: 🦄 Putting Away Childish Things – “In The Book of Dust trilogy, Philip Pullman does what few authors for young readers ever attempt”, says Morgan Leigh Davies, “he lets his protagonist grow up.”
WLT: 🏺🧙🏻♀️ ✨ Medea Sang Me a Corrido by Dahlia de la Cerda – Set in Northern Mexico, De la Cerda’s Medea Sang Me a Corrido (translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary) “is a novel of interlinked stories, each chapter offering a distinct voice that builds into a larger, haunting chorus”, says Britta Stromeyer. Its author, she declares, “boldly reimagines Greek mythology within a contemporary landscape, using the figure of Medea as the collection’s anchor and a living, evolving presence” – allowing it to stand “as a witness to survival and solidarity, where even the most fixed stories can be rewritten.”
Compact: 🔒 Why Women Thrill to True Crime – Malin Hasselblad reveals that nine out of 10 of Britain’s bestselling paperback novels feature the murder of a woman. Unfortunately, I can’t trace a free version of the complete article, so it’s a case of reading what is revealed or taking out a subscription to access the whole thing.
Readings: 🦘🌷 September 2026 – Dawdling through the latest issue of the e-journal Readings Monthly, I found features about “The Readings New Australian Fiction Prize 2026 shortlist, along with lively accounts of this year’s judging process so far.” Also ushered in are the latest spring releases, including an extract from Toby Walsh’s God AI, and the front cover carries the bizarre hybrid human-plant artwork from the jacket of The Office as a Boat, Moya Costello’s deadpan field study of going to work during the height of a heatwave.
Literary Review of Canada (via Archive Today): 🍁🖋️ Statues, Stamps, and Souvenirs – Caroline Noël explores what we want with dead writers in Carole Gerson’s Literary Life After Death: Commemorations of Writers in English-Speaking Canada.
Vanity Fair (via Archive Today): 🎤🎬🕵 First Look: Helen Mirren Captures the Difficult Genius of Patricia Highsmith in A Talent for Murder – “Patricia Highsmith spent nearly five decades creating monsters and sociopaths that readers couldn’t help but fall in love with”, writes Rebecca Ford. “Before its TIFF premiere, Mirren [opened up to her] about embodying literature’s most uncompromising misanthrope in Anton Corbijn’s new film.”
The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: Author Rebecca Gopoian Releases New Book, First Rule of Fire – Rebecca Gopoian’s debut historical novel First Rule of Fire is “an intergenerational story told in three narratives, spanning from the Ottoman Empire 1914 at the start of the Armenian Genocide to suburban New Jersey 1982. Based in part on real diaries, the book explores how one family builds hope and resilience from the roots of trauma.”
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): 🚫 My ex-friend Jon Ronson may be a case study in the corrupting toxicity of trans ideology – In his latest book, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men, the British-American journalist, author and filmmaker Jon Ronson includes a chapter on his former friend (and now adversary), the Irish comedy writer and political activist Graham Linehan – a chapter Linehan describes in this article as standing “as an indictment of [Ronson] and the cowardly social class of people who refuse to confront uncomfortable truths”.
Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade: 🤖📚 AI Is Destroying Collectible Books – “Do AI companies buy scarce, rare, and collectible books?” asks Scott Brown, the proprietor of Downtown Brown Books in Northwest Portland, Oregon. “Absolutely”, he says. “They’ve [ordered] some from me.”
The Baffler (via Archive Today): ✈️🚶 ️Long Life’s Journey – Robert Rubsam reviews the “poetic travelogues of Japanese poet” Matsuo Bashō’s (1644-1694), The Narrow Road of Oku (newly translated by Meredith McKinney), which traces his intrepid 1500-mile walk to the deep north of Honshu, then back along the island’s western coast before finally arriving at Lake Biwa.
Electric Literature: ⚣ Northeast Indian Literature That Interrogates the Nation – Assamese writer and translator, Aruni Kashyap, author of How to Date a Fanatic – a gay novel that “highlights the consequences of a failed neoliberal state that has created a violently divisive society by politicizing religion” – shares a fascinating list of literature from India’s Northeast (a region he describes as “highly contested and racialized”).
Womack’s Wanderings: 🔗🖋️ Networks [Obsession] – “Writers do not exist on their own.” When Philip Womack “was writing about the second Shakespeare monument, in Westminster Abbey (commissioned and funded by Pope), [he] traced out a literary heritage connecting the Bard to his literary successor”, which went like this: “Shakespeare → Heminges and Condell → John Milton → John Dryden → William Wycherley → Alexander Pope.” Pope, he tells us, “was a mere four handshakes […] from the man himself”. He then attempted to “draw a literary connection from Shakespeare down to the present day”, and so it continued… Great fun! You should try it yourselves.
The Marginalian: 🧠❤️🔥🔤 The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions – Maria Popover describes The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopaedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust by Tiffany Watt Smith as “a linguistic ledger of feeling exploring the cultural histories and psychosocial nuances behind the words we use to name our most confounding, complex, yet common experiences”. Here she chooses ten of her favourite “untranslatable words from around the world for very specific affective states and emotional reactions with no equivalent in English”.
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): 🎶🕺🪩 The Strange Power of the Dance-Floor Novel – “[W]riters from Leo Tolstoy to Christopher Isherwood have used the dance floor to bridge social and political worlds, to turn private life into public spectacle, and to work out all manner of worries, sorrows, and disappointments.” Robert Rubsam finds “a new run of books embrace the literary potential of underground electronic music.”
The Road Through The Books: 📖📚 A Library of One’s Own – “Woolf was a ferocious readers who much preferred classics […] to contemporary fiction […] and an extraordinary writer who enjoyed reading far more than writing.” Tamara on the “personal library of Virginia Woolf”.
The Yale Review: 🪦🫣🔪 How to Talk About Murder – “Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are full of ghastly crimes,” remarks Emily Ogden, “but the true horror lies in their confessions.” This piece is drawn from her forthcoming biographical history, Darkness Becomes Bright: The Haunted Life (And Afterlife) of Edgar Allan Poe – an intimate investigation into the shadowy life and horrifyingly compelling work of the American writer of macabre fiction.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🚫⚢ In Russia, Nobody Knows Where the Lines Are Anymore – In her opinion piece, the Russian writer (currently based in Berlin) Natasha Kiseleva tells us that a novelist she knows “recently wanted to do something that is now forbidden in Russia: publish a story about two women in love.” To do so, she was obliged to hide the sex of her characters “by writing in the present tense (present-tense verbs carry no gender in Russian) and by choosing names that both men and women use”. This is because, since declaring “all-out war on Ukraine in 2022, [Putin has] unleashed a devastating crackdown on free speech” and, more recently, on literature.
Literary Ladies Guide: 🛸⚠️👦👧 A pair of impactful literary anniversaries – Nava Atlas on the “posthumous bestseller landing of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower; and [Margaret Wise Brown’s] Goodnight Moon’s publishing anniversary”.
Andrew Doyle: ✈️🐷⚠️ The Real Animal Farm – “One of life’s small pleasures is the uncanny sensation of exploring a place previously encountered only in fiction. My house is not too far from Wallington, the village where George Orwell lived and worked […]. It was here that he conceived Animal Farm (1945), and it was only by walking there myself that I discovered there is an actual ‘Manor Farm’ – the apparent model for the farm in the novel – just a few hundred metres from where the great man lived.” Writer, broadcaster and satirist Andrew Doyle visits “the village that inspired George Orwell’s classic tale.”
Publishers Weekly: Celebrating Gloria Steinem – “The trailblazing journalist and feminist activist, who died earlier this week at 92, leaves behind a towering legacy, not only in an ongoing social movement but in print. The books [included in this piece], reviewed by PW, showcase her work for Ms., the magazine she co-founded, along with her effort to inspire children, and her acclaimed memoirs, including [An Unexpected Life,] published earlier this year.”
Global Times: 📷📚 Sinkhole-turned library offers distinctive reading experience to visitors in China’s Jiangxi – Some striking photographs of “a special sinkhole-turned library [that] opened to the public recently in Wuyuan County of east China’s Jiangxi Province. It incorporates a natural sinkhole and surrounding rock walls into its architecture [and] features a carved spiral staircase and warm lighting, offering visitors a distinctive reading experience.”
The Tearoom: 🖋️ The Lost Shine of a Golden Girl – In The Women Behind the Books, a guest post from Lizzie Broadbent, who uncovers the little-known story of British literary agent Nancy Pearn, we glimpse something of her remarkable career representing “some of the most celebrated writers of the early twentieth century, including D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, H.G. Wells, Dorothy L. Sayers, and A.A. Milne”, and her extraordinary talent for “finding markets, negotiating contracts, shaping careers, and sometimes persuading writers to write things they might never have considered otherwise.”
The Hedgehog Review: 📖 In Praise of Unclose Reading – “As I grow older, the ideal of rigorous analysis speaks less to my needs as a reader.” Stephen Akey asks, “how much pleasure does rigorous reading really bring?”
OUPblog: 🔤📖 I had to look (them up) – “When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching.” Edwin L. Battistella gets wordy.
Porter Square Books: ⚢🕵️️ Review of Bone Horn – “Reading Bone Horn is like watching a tight rope walker maintain their balance by holding a long pole with heavy weights on either side. Both the distance between the weights and their specific heaviness allow the tightrope walker to maintain their balance”, says Josh Cook – bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “In Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s book one weight is the delightfully absurd case our private detective narrator has been hired to solve: Did Alice B. Toklas have a horn growing out of her head?” This title was also reviewed by Anne Laughlin in the September-October issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review: Did Alice B. Toklas Have Horns?.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🤖🌡️☣️ A Government for the People, but Not by People – Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’. Examining everything from robot rights and Elon Musk’s origins to what data centres cost wildlife, she demonstrates how the architects of the Artificial State had no theory of governance, or any capacity for restraint, basing their ideas for the future on science fiction. In her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, says Jennifer Szalai, she “examines what happens when we abandon liberal democracy for rule by automation and machines.” Her book was also reviewed by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore review – an ominous warning of tech takeover.
The Times (via Archive Today): 🕵️♂️🫣⚢ This terrific novel is like a cross between Barbara Pym and Stephen King – “In his wicked comedy, The Girls, John Bowen [of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates fame] takes us into the world of vicars, fêtes and murder in the Cotswolds of the 1970s”, says John Self of a rediscovered (and recently republished) black comedy-gothic horror novel.
AP: 📜🪶 Wendell Berry, Kentucky-born author who advocated a simpler life, has died at 92 – Hillel Italie reports that “Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgements of an industrial, commercialized society, has died”. The Library of America published a “collection of tributes from friends, admirers, and collaborators” in his memory: “A Wonder Is What It Is”: Celebrating the Life of Wendell Berry, 1934–2026.
Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry: Why You Should Read Pulp In 2026 – “Pulp is having a bit of a renaissance in the 21st Century and thank God for that. The classic entertainment of yesteryear can still provide plenty of thrills and chills today, and there’s a ton of authors and other creators putting out new genre stories every day.” Jeffery Pintabona asks: “What is pulp and why should you care?”
The Globe and Mail (via Archive Today): 🍁💕 On today’s dating apps, singles must read between the lines before swiping right on a book lover – Many book-loving straight ladies “are dealing with a new kind of poser [on dating apps] as hardcovers supplant [the traditional macho look] in profile pictures”, reveals Courtney Shea. “Suddenly book boys are everywhere, but whether this reflects authentic bibliophile tendencies or just savvy branding is a different story.”
The Atlantic (via Archive Today): 🤖😆 Why I Am Right About AI – In Paul “Claude” Gigot’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece, he informs us that having thought deeply on the issue for “close to 20 minutes”, he has concluded that “human writers are expensive, and they eventually die”. Furthermore, “AI is cheaper, and will never join a union.”
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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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