An end of week recap
“I am no longer young, and still not half perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”
– Mary Oliver (Messenger)
Today is World Card Making Day for the arty-types amongst us, then for those who enjoy a little fermented honey in their tipple, it is National Mead Day in the UK, Poland, Sweden and the USA. Finally, tomorrow offers the ideal opportunity to spruce up your reading and writing dens on Improve Your Office Day if you live in Australia, Canada, the UK or the United States.
Joining our literary conga line today are the French author Alain-Fournier (1886), Russian lyric poet Sergei Yesenin (1895), French poet Louis Aragon (1897), American novelist and short story writer Thomas Wolfe (1900), British veterinary surgeon and author James Herriot (1916) and American writer and public intellectual Gore Vidal (1925). 🎂 Sunday’s birthday lineup includes the American journalist and short-story writer Damon Runyon (1880), Estonian writer and politician August Malk (1900), English romance novelist Jackie Collins (1937) and American author of gothic and erotic literature Anne Rice (1941).
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.
* No Tove Too Short *
Please don’t forget there is now a dedicated index page for everything Tove, making it easier to find all the relevant posts. You can access it from the main menu at the top of every Book Jotter page. >> Tove Trove Main Index >>. Plenty more will be happening with this project over the coming months and years (feel free to join in). 🎩👜
* Prepare to Space Out in November *
* The Truth and Nothing But… *
* Blogs from the Bookcellar *
* 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 last month:
* 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 or the Diary of Tovian Events. Be sure not to miss out on all the goings-on in your part of the world! 🎩👜
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Financial Times (via Archive Today): 🖨️ Fitzcarraldo – inside the chicest publisher on earth – “Fitzcarraldo Editions has become a hallmark for a generation”, writes Helen Bain. “Its signature International Klein Blue and clean cream titles include Nobel- and Pulitzer-prize winners, with authors ranging from French memoirist Annie Ernaux to New York-based war reporter Jon Lee Anderson and Hong Kong novelist Dorothy Tse. It specialises in contemporary literary fiction and long-form essays, seeking out work that is determinedly “innovative, imaginative, ambitious”, broadly kept at a 50-50 split between English language and literature in translation.” Jacques Testard “is transforming our reading habits, one blue book at a time”.
Harry’s Substack: 📖💐 A Day with Mrs Dalloway – “I am unashamed, now, to admit that I really did not take to Virginia Woolf’s writing: I am equally unashamed to admit that this was largely because it made me feel stupid.” Harry J. West with a lovely piece on “reading […], re-reading [and eventually becoming fully immersed in] Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway”.
The Sunday Times (via Archive Today): 🦄🫣 Is this 1,200-page epic saga worth the slog? – British ‘fantastic fiction’ writer China Miéville’s The Rouse “took 20 years to write, spans decades, has two storylines and a 1,100-page epilogue.” I linked to a Boston Review interview with him in WUTW #481 and here include Jessie Lethaby’s review of his new fantasy-horror novel. She subsequently commented about her piece in The Unseen Review to say she does “not write the headlines” but apparently Miéville’s book “won [her] over in the end, [though] it was not without its challenges.”
The Daily Star: Celebrating literary minds: Reflections on editing festschrifts – “A festschrift is a publication honouring an eminent individual in a particular field—a scholar, creative writer, or scientist—usually to mark a significant birthday, retirement, or other milestone”, says Mohammad Quayum, “an academic, writer, and editor whose scholarship bridges South Asian and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.” He has “been involved in curating and editing festschrifts since 2018” and explains in this essay why they “are likely to benefit Asian academia in multiple ways.”
Orion: 🦋🌳🗣️ Forest Language – In this excerpt from A Forest Language: Words that Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees (with a foreword by the wonderful Maria Popova), Hannah Fries finds “wisdom in the vocabulary of trees”.
London Review of Books (via Archive Today): Anthony Burgess heads south – “For a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit mouthy and contrarian. Not part of the self-regarding London literary establishment. A Big Canvas man, equally at home with Beethoven or Shakespeare. The local hero did have an Achilles’ heel, though. Burgess had to leave his birthplace early to find – or invent – himself”, writes Ian Penman in this piece about the newly republished Tremor of Intent.
Newcity: 🎤🛸 Time Between Worlds: Audrey Niffenegger on the Sequel to “The Time Traveler’s Wife” – Brendan Tynan Buck talks to the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife about her new book Life Out of Order, “her artistic process, climate optimism versus pessimism and the pressure of following a phenomenon.”
Westminster Abbey: 🧙♂️🍻🦁 Abbey to honour J.R.R. Tolkien – “J.R.R. Tolkien, writer, artist, scholar and linguist is to be honoured in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner alongside his close friend and fellow writer, C.S. Lewis.” Also see, Alexander Larman’s Does Tolkien deserve to be celebrated in Westminster Abbey? in The Spectator.
A couple of Christies: 🕵️♂️🔪
USA Today: 🚠 Lucy Foley went ‘method’ to revive Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple after 50 years – “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel (out Sept. 22 from William Morrow) is a brand-new Miss Marple mystery set in the Swiss Alps in 1950, where the geriatric amateur detective is vacationing with her close friend Dolly Bantry. But after a body is found and all the hotel residents are snowbound due to a blizzard, Miss Marple is back on the case.” Now what Clare Mulroy would really like to know is has Lucy Foley pulled it off and can her new book “appease [the] purists?”
ScreenRant: 🎤🎬 Hercule Poirot’s Agatha Christie Movie Future Addressed By Kenneth Branagh – “Will Kenneth Branagh return [to the screen] as a classic mystery investigator?” asks Nick Bythrow.
JSTOR Daily: The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door – “In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. As literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun writes, drawing on three memoirs from this era, women in that line of work had some distinct advantages but also faced serious hardships, both physical and social”, finds Livia Gershon.
Literary Hub: 🍁🔤 What Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and Joan Didion Really Meant With Their Most Famous Aphorisms – In this excerpt from Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations, Canadian humour writer Eli Burnstein “traces the origins of some of the most popular phrases in literature”.
A Country of the Mind: Personal Curriculum: A History Book for Every Century (C.E. Edition) – This is a continuation of Maggie Desbaillets’ “personal curriculum listing a chosen book for each century from the 10th to 1st century B.C.” in which she aims to “provide a single text that would serve as an introduction to the era in which it was written.” Her “choices are based on the texts [she believes] encapsulate an era and contribute to an ongoing dialogue throughout history.”
Sydney Review of Books: 🦘🏄♀️ An Ocean of Her Own – “Surf culture, and surf writing, has always been something of a sausage-fest. Reading A Catalogue of Love as a fellow surfer and writer, Melissa Fagan finds much to appreciate about Erin Hortle’s literary effort to reclaim the waves.”
Realnoe Vremya: Olive Schreiner’s “The African Farm” — a genuine bestseller of the late Victorian era – In 1883, the South African author Olive Schreiner “published [The Story of an African Farm,] a bestselling novel under a male pseudonym, which became a manifesto of the ‘new woman’”.
The New Times: 🖨️ Africa Must Take Books Seriously as an Industry – “Through [Mutesi Gasana’s] visits to Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, for the Booksellers and Publishers conferences, [she has] witnessed something remarkable: a deliberate effort to promote culture through books. [She attends] these events as a publisher and bookseller, but each time [she returns] home thinking about something bigger than the book trade. [She asks herself]: What would happen if African countries treated books and culture as seriously as the UAE does?”
Counter Craft: 🫏 The Roots of the Novel Are Parody, Pastiche, and Play – “Each year [author Lincoln Michel attempts] to conquer one big ol’ classic that [he’s] yet to read. This year, it’s Don Quixote aka ‘the first modern novel’, 950+ page adventures of an insane wannabe knight and his portly sidekick.” He says reading it has “been a goddamn blast.”
The Kathmandu Post: How Nepali literature should respond to political changes – “Contemporary Nepali literature does not overtly reflect the chaotic nature of today’s political climate”, says Abhi Subedi.
Poetry Foundation: ✍️ A Writer’s Life: A Life – “The phrase ‘a writer’s life’ calls up all kinds of woebegone and absinthe-addled ghosts and is often affixed to a colon when it appears in the titles of biographies—a glut of them in recent years.” Camille Ralphs looks at “what some of our greatest writers have said about literature as a vocation.”
Oh, Sugar! Danish authors to know and read – Isabella Reiter has written a light-hearted but useful piece introducing several of her favourite Danish (and one Greenlandic) works in translation – relishing “the minimalist speech that tends to imbue most of [these] contemporary works [i.e.], meaning subdued beneath simplicity.”
New Scientist (Via Archive Today): 👨🔬🧪🔬 Benjamin Labatut has written an utterly haunting novella about science – “Using real scientists as characters, When We Cease to Understand the World looks at what happens when science unravels the conceit that we can understand reality. It is a brilliant piece of writing, says Jacklin Kwan”.
BBC Scotland: 🕵️♂️🔪 Scottish crime writer Peter May dies aged 74 – “Peter May, one of Scotland’s most prolific television writers and crime authors, has died at the age of 74”, reports Iona Young. “The novel he said would be his last – Island of the Dead – is to be published in January 2027.”
Strange Horizons: 🍁🌡️⚠️ The Hunger of Those Who Built It by Wendy Waring – “The Hunger of Those Who Built It is a mystery about developing an egalitarian Eden in the centre of Paris in 2033 and the potential healing of a fractured family, but it has a more suspenseful story to tell. The main characters have the best of intentions but fall victim to their own idealism. Can technology solve the problems it has created? Can we fix what ails us as a species?” Jan Priddy reviews Canadian ecofiction author Wendy Waring’s dystopian novel.
Ancillary Review of Books: Throwing in the Textual Towel: Review of Kojin Karatani’s The End of Modern Literature – The “philosopher and former literary critic Kojin Karatani is a bit sheepish about announcing the end of modern literature” and his “tone of awkwardness extends through chunks” of The End of Modern Literature: On Permanent Revolution – an analysis of what comes after the death of literature. Bruce J. Krajewski explains why.
TNR: 👻 How Edgar Allan Poe Mined His Own Misery – “Edgar Allan Poe can be difficult to take seriously”, remarks Evan Kindley. In fact, even his “contemporaries condescended to him, regarding him as talented but childish and undisciplined.” However, in “Emily Ogden’s new book [Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe], Poe is not a concocter of hokey ghost stories. He is an excavator of repressed emotion”.
The Folio Society: 🖨️ Hot Off the Press: Behind the Scenes with Gomer – “Gomer Press is a “multi-generational book bindery and printers [Folio has] been lucky enough to call [a] partner for the last [six] years.” Last “summer, [the] team paid them a visit, and [took] a camera or two along for the ride…”
See You: 👩🎨🖌️✂️ Book covers and the projects inspired by them – Artist and writer Carolyn Yoo shares “seven book cover-inspired art projects, for the artists who love readings”.
The Asian Age: Book Review | Hazrat Mahal, Unlikely Achiever – Hazrat Mahal: The Rebel Begam of Awadh by the acclaimed historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones “gives readers a brief peek into the life of Hazrat Mahal, an elusive figure in Indian history.” The daughter of a slave, probably of African descent, she entered Prince Wajid Ali Shah’s Pari Khana as a courtesan and became one of his many wives. “Her life”, says Rachna Chhabria, “is veiled in mystery and ambiguity, though the little that is known is quite intriguing.”
The Commonweal: 🧘♀️ Literature Is Not About You – “Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience”, argues Drew Calvert.
The Arts Fuse: 🗣️ Book Review: “Talking in Tongues” — What It Means to Make Bones Sing – “In this rich collection of essays and introductions, translator and writer Peter Wortsman considers language as an intimate, imperfect act of resurrection—and guides readers toward a varied company of German- and French-language authors.” David Mehegan considers Talking in Tongues – Essays on Language and Literature.
What to read if: 📖👦👧 What to read if… you’re curiouser – “Wandering the highways and byways of Substack, WTRI stumbled across The Books That Made Us, where people describe and discuss books that have been significant to them – which naturally raised the question: what would WTRI choose? And where would one start?”
Literary Review of Canada (via Archive Today): 🍁 Crossing a Line – “For so long, I didn’t know about Wright Morris or his remarkable books because others took centre stage at my high school and public library. Beyond authors from other times were authors from other places […] because nobody was telling me about writers from my corner of the world, beyond the handful of literary superstars who achieved fame elsewhere: think Willa Cather, Kurt Andersen, or Mary Pipher.” Kyle Wyatt on “the connection between books and home”.
The Observer (via Archive Today): ♿✈️ Hanif Kureishi: ‘I never believed I would travel again’ – “The author of The Buddha of Suburbia was rendered tetraplegic by a fall four years ago. His first overseas holiday since the accident brings physical and emotional challenges, but also delicious rewards”. His latest memoir, Are You with Me Now? written with his son Carlo Kureishi will be published by Hamish Hamilton in November.
The Yale Review: 🏺📜🪶⚢ The Sappho We Fell in Love With – “Mary Barnard reinvented an ancient poet for a modern world”, finds Emily Greenwood. Last month, her long-celebrated work, Sappho: The Mary Barnard Translation, was republished as a lavish collector’s edition – alongside the original Greek for the first time.
Reading Matters: 📖 A communal fall reading reset begins (2026 Reading Well Challenge #1) – In this “one-book, book-of-your-choice challenge”, Sara Hildreth discusses “intention setting, book selecting, and how to begin a book well” as she prepares to do it all again as part of the “glorious season of renewal”. This was posted last month but you can do the Read Well Challenge at any time.
The Conversation: 🎬 Stop adapting Jane Austen! Five other 18th‑century writers perfect for the screen – With two new adaptions coming to our screens this autumn, “television’s long-running love affair with Jane Austen shows little sign of abating.” Yet, from Eliza Haywood to Anne Radcliffe, there are other celebrated 18-century writers whose work would be perfect for TV, argues Amy Louise Blaney.
The Irish Times (via Archive Today): 🎤⚣ John Boyne: ‘Wilde was gay, he went to Trinity, he went to England. That’s me, me, me’ – First mentioned here in WUTW #466, “the Irish author’s new novel [The Weight of Angels] is an alternate history in which Wilde lives a long life. It has been on his list of books to write for years, he says”. There’s also an excellent piece by Boyne in the Irish Independent: John Boyne: What might Oscar Wilde have become, had hypocrisy and puritanism not laid him low? In addition, please be sure to read Sandra’s excellent review, #BookReview ‘The Weight of Angels’ by John Boyne, at Sandra Danby’s Book Reviews.
The Tearoom: 🫣 I Wanted to Write to Elspeth Barker – “When I read a novel that I really enjoy, one of my first instincts lately is to look up the author. I have had the great joy of interviewing some of my favorite authors this year, asking them questions about their writing and creative process, [although] this is […] not always possible. In the case of O Caledonia, [its Scottish author] Elspeth Barker died just in 2022, a year close enough to feel cruel and taunting.” Mariella Hunt comes to terms with “loving a novel by an author who is no longer here”.
Wired (via Archive Today): 🤑 Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career? – “A quarter-century ago, Borsook published a wildly prophetic, penetrating book about Silicon Valley called [Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian World of High-Tech]. Then she disappeared.” Tommy Craggs investigates.
Cultured (via Archive Today): 🎤✍️ Three Acclaimed Critics Reveal What Lured Them Into the World of Fiction – “The conventional wisdom”, says Karly Quadros, “is that critics don’t make good novelists. Chris Kraus, Ben Eastham, and Elvia Wilk—all critics and novelists in their own right—complicate the conversation.”
Smithsonian Magazine: 👑 Who Wrote Elizabeth I’s Most Scathing Letters? New Research Suggests the Tudor Queen’s Male Secretaries Revised Her Correspondence to Emphasize Her Temper – “An analysis of more than 500 missives found that Elizabeth’s advisers crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in her messages to such figures as Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI of Scotland”, reveals Clodagh Murphy.
Atlas Obscura: ✈️👻🫣 14 Real Places That Haunt the Pages of Literature – “One of literature’s greatest gifts is its ability to transport us to other worlds: some utopian and fantastical, others dark and unnerving, scary and supernatural … This guide is all about the latter […]. These are the novels, short stories, and novellas that get under your skin, that stay in your psyche long after you’ve put them down”. Holyn Thigpen tours “the real-world locations that gave iconic horror books their nightmares.”
BBC England: 📚 Why bookshops are booming in the TikTok age – “Opening your own book shop might be a lofty daydream for some bookworms looking to escape their 9-5, but more and more people are making it a reality”, reveals Charis Scott-Holm.
K. C-mail: 👎 Books everyone seems to love that I think are terrible – Purely because it amuses her to do so, “aspiring literary failure” E. K. Carlisle shares a “needlessly negative set of short-fire reviews.”
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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. >>