An end of week recap
“I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible.”
– Rudyard Kipling (A Book of Words, 1928)
Literary sorts making their entrance into the world on this day include the Polish poet Leopold Staff (1878), Swedish writer of fiction and screenplays Astrid Lindgren (1907), American author and writing instructor Gary Provost (1944), American author, journalist and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke (1947), Swedish poet Kristina Lugn (1948), American mystery writer Cara Black (1951) and Lithuanian writer Jurga Ivanauskaitė (1961). 🥂 They are followed on Sunday by the German novelist and 1912 Nobel Prize laureate Gerhart Hauptmann (1862), English poet Charlotte Mew (1869), American modernist poet, critic, translator and editor Marianne Moore (1887), English writer Richmal Crompton (1890), Italian avant-garde writer Giorgio Manganelli (1922), English novelist and short story writer J. G. Ballard (1930), American mystery and suspense writer Carole Nelson Douglas (1944) and Australian author Liane Moriarty (1966).
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 *
* 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.
Additionally, 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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The Australian (via Archive Today): 🦘🎨🖌️🦄 Graphic novels are having a moment in Australia. This one shows why – “Oscar-winning artist Shaun Tan returns with Hometown, a visually spectacular tale of unlikely love, prejudice and aliens”, reveals Joy Lawn.
BBC Culture: 🦄 ‘Depicts humanity at its most grotesque’: Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver’s Travels is so misunderstood – “First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift’s adventure novel [Gulliver’s Travels] has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a ‘misanthropic satire’ or a ‘fantastical nursery tale’?” asks Tamlin Magee. You may well find the answer to this in Chris Lovegrove’s current reading challenge, #Gulliver300th over at Calmgrove Books. I also point you in the direction of Shruti Rajagopalan: The Political Economy of Gulliver’s Travels, in which Henry Oliver “sat down with [his] colleague [earlier this month] to discuss Swift’s great novel.” (You can listen to the interview or read the transcript by following the above link.)
Literary Hub: 👃📙 The Olfactory History of Book Collecting – Will Tullett, a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York, “explores the role of scent in a book’s life” in an excerpt from his latest book, Sniff: A History of Smells.
Engelsberg Ideas: Saki’s two selves – “Oliver Soden’s elegant biography of H.H. Munro [Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki], better known as Saki, reveals a complex man”. Was “his real character the dandy who skewered the English upper classes, or the fervent patriot who died in the trenches?” wonders Philip Womack.
The Arts Fuse: 📜🪶 Poetry Review: The Sensationally Intense Music of Marina Tsvetaeva – “It’s the name among great Russian poets of the 20th century that, if you aren’t already familiar with Slavic vowels and consonants, you are most likely to trip over”, says Jim Kates. “In Vega’s Fugitive, translator Alyssa Dinega Gillespie brings the Russian poet’s fierce sound and emotional intensity into English.”
The Nature of Fun: 🤔 Why Keep Bothering? – “Thirty years ago, author Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay that I still think about all the time. Originally published in the April 1996 issue of Harper’s, the piece was titled Perchance to Dream and it became so widely discussed afterwards that people started referring to it simply as ‘the Harper’s essay.’” Later included in his first book of essays, How to Be Alone (under its original title Why Bother?), this “infamous” article is now revisited by Kristopher Jansma.
American Library in Paris: 🏆🪖 Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska: Winner of the 2026 American Library in Paris Book Award – Hotel Exile: Paris in The Shadow of War, Jane Rogoyska’s “compelling account of Paris under Nazi occupation, the lives of those forced into exile, and the legendary hotel at the center of this story wins the 14th edition of the Book Award.”
Kyiv Independent: ☭ 100 years ago, Kyiv’s young writers sought artistic freedom. Stalin’s purges cut their experiment short – “A century ago, some of Kyiv’s most talented young writers had the idea to push back against the pretension and mediocrity they worried were taking root in literary circles”, writes Kate Tsurkan. “Yet, with the start of mass repression that began under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin shortly after, many of those writers never had the chance to discover what such a project could have become.”
New Scientist (via Archive Today): 📺🛸⚠️ Blade Runner 2099 is coming. How does Philip K. Dick’s original hold up? – “With the new Blade Runner TV series out this month, sci-fi columnist (and superfan) Emily H. Wilson rereads the source material, Philip K. Dick’s seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
Business Standard: 📚🖼️🍽️ NMACC opens The Library, pairing books, art, food with a stage for readings – “Mumbai has got another cultural space with The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre’s (NMACC) “The Library”, which opened on November 1, bringing together literature, art, design and food”, reports Aarya Shetty.
Harry’s Substack: ⚢🦄 Before you read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – Harry J. West lays “out clear and plain the certain gems of information that are beneficial before one steps into Orlando’s 300 year-long life that will make the first reading experience a pleasurable one, rather than one at risk of making the reader’s head spin off their shoulders.” Here he presents a “precursory education on Vita Sackville-West and the history of Knole to compliment your Orlando reading experience”.
IOL: Three South African literary classics reissued for a new generation – “The publisher AD Donker has embarked on a project to reprint some of South Africa’s most notable literature”, says Mark Levin. “The publisher believes that great books endure because they continue to speak to new generations of readers.” The first three titles in the series are featured in this article.
Culture.pl: 🪖 Han Kang: How Warsaw Inspired South Korea’s Nobel Laureate – “Han Kang’s writing explores memory, life after catastrophe and places where past events have left a deep imprint on the present. For her, Warsaw and Gwangju are cities where the present cannot be separated from the past”, writes Aleksandra Pakieła.
The American Scholar: 📖📔🧠 It’s All in Your Head – “Until recently, whenever I read a novel or a play, I largely forgot its contents within a matter of weeks. But one day something changed, and I am now able to recall the structure and even extended sections of a few dozen works of literature, meaning that I find myself the surprised owner of a small internal library.” Bonnie Friedman declares it “a remarkable thing […] to remember what you read”.
Wheeler Centre: 🦘📖 [Read] Reading Social – “Social reading events, retreats, book doofs and parties are growing in popularity. Jaclyn Crupi wants to find out why we suddenly want to read together.”
deutschland.de: ⚫🔴🟡✡️🖨️ “Berlin has once again become a meeting place for Hebrew-speaking artists” – “By establishing Altneuland Press, two Israeli writers are reviving Berlin’s Jewish literary heritage. Co-founder Dory Manor explains [to Stefanie Hardick] why the city is once again a special place for Hebrew literature.”
the thought of the thing: ✨🕯️🖤 the depths of a mirror – House of Mist is a little-known “Chilean gothic classic, shockingly published the same year as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Both are novels of crumbling estates, Bluebeards, and women whose absence is presence.” Joseph Alcala shares his reading experience of this dark romance, one of the first South American novels written in a style later known as magical realism, by María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980).
Bloomberg (via Archive Today): 📚 The Bookstore of the Future Is Very, Very Specific – Independent shops, such as the newly opened Persephone Books in London, are offering “hyper-niche subject matter” and have become “surprisingly big” businesses, says Alice Robb.
Twice noted: 🗒️🗒️
Psyche: 📔✍️🧠 How to take notes that actually help you learn – “If you want to remember and understand, copying isn’t enough” – cognitive psychologist Cynthia Nebel, an “expert on learning, shares how to make notes work for you”.
Noted: 🎤🖋️📔 Nishant Jain on Drawing as a Form of Note-Taking – Jillian Hess first met Canadian author Nishant Jain at a fountain-pen store in New York. Having previously “admired [his] work and exchanged a few messages with him”, she took him to a café (in the company of writer Caroline Cala Donofrio), where he shared “his note-taking practices” and “some of his wonderful sketches of little people” with them.
First Things (via Archive Today): 🍁🎓 The Campus Novel to End All Campus Novels – “Can the campus novel still exist, as a genre, if universities are in decline?” asks M. Ciftci. Apparently, that is the very “question raised by [Canadian novelist, essayist and literary critic] Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, Lords of Serendipity, a hilarious but unforgiving satire of the ‘laurel-wreathed debt trap’ that universities have become.”
Global Voices: 🎤 The dreamer who wants the world to read Nepali literature – “We no longer see Nepali literature as something confined by geographical boundaries.” Sangita Swechcha interviewed Rishi Ram Adhikari, founder and chairman of the Kitab Yatra Foundation and the Kitab Yatra book distribution company, via email.
Creative Boom: 🍁👩🎨🎨🔮 The Balbusso Twins on revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale, and why book illustration is like making a movie – “Anna and Elena share their process, influences and hard-won lessons from returning to Gilead for Folio Society’s new limited edition”, says Tom May.
The New York Review (via Archive Today): 💘💞💔 Unfinished Business – The novels of British author Claire-Louise Bennett “have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.” Meghan O’Gieblyn examines her most recent work Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.
A Narrative Of Their Own: ✍️ Writing Rituals of Edith Wharton – “Writing longhand on sheets of paper, [she] would drop the completed pages onto the floor of her bedroom to be collected by her secretary to type up.” In the latest edition of Kate Jones’ “weekly publication exploring the lives and literature of women”, she examines the “what, where and why” of Edith Wharton’s writing habits.
The Globe and Mail (via Archive Today): 🍁🤓🏆 A book club for one: Why I collect every Booker Prize-winning hardcover on my shelf – “I often think about my books. One certainty to emerge is that I have never read a Booker Prize-winner that did not impress me.” Canadian writer, historian and commentator J.D.M. Stewart “began collecting Booker Prize winners in 1995. Thirty years later, his collection keeps growing.”
Jansplaining: 📰🖊️ Has a book-review revival finally begun? – “Three new publications could make 2027 a turnaround year that includes the return of America’s best living book critic, the Pulitzer-winning Michael Dirda”, says Jan Harayda.
Estonian World: ✝️ The book that helped shape the Estonian language – In 1739, the Bible was published in Estonian; it helped establish North Estonian as the dominant written standard and shaped the language that would become central to national identity.
Washington Independent Review of Books: Murmurs from the Hills: Rwandan Tales – “In Murmurs from the Hills, a beautifully constructed collection of loosely interwoven stories, Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga draws on collective memories, folktales, and myth to evoke a world that colonialism and civil war nearly obliterated”, writes Bárbara Mujica. “Storytelling”, she says, “becomes an act of defiance in this stunning collection.”
The Green Light Newsletter: 🤔 Three Ways to Read Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party – Joshua Porter has “been a fan” of The Garden Party by the New Zealand writer and critic since he “first read it in college.” However, he has noticed there are several “takes on it, […] that vary widely.” In this article he asks: “Is this classic short story a Biblical story, a Greek Myth, or a Little Women reference? Or none of the above?”
Reactor: 🫣🛸 A Reimagination of a Lovecraft Classic with a Korean Twist: A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young – “In A Plagued Sea (translated by Sophie Bowman), Kim Bo-Young reimagines H.P. Lovecraft’s classic The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the cosmic horror novella of the Cthulhu Mythos, and sets it in present-day Korea. Originally written and published in 1931, Kim brings the story to modern times while preserving the horrors of the unknown that is prevalent in Lovecraft’s work”, says Helen Rhee.
Asian Review of Books: 📜🪶💘🗣️🎶 “The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature” – The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature: Poems, Songs, Plays, Stories (rendered into English by “more than two dozen translators”), is an “enormous anthology, which gathers six centuries of Kashmiri writing into 664 pages.” An introduction to the literary landscape of Kashmir by Indian anthropologist, writer and translator Onaiza Drabu, it contains “14th-century mystics and Persian romances […], modernist lyrics and short stories, radio plays and the first Kashmiri opera”, as well as “forms that rarely survive the trip to print, such as lullabies, rice-planting chants and the ballads of wandering satirists.” According to reviewer Vikram Zutshi: “Nothing of this scope has appeared before.”
Gript: ☭ Why I left the Left: Camus, conscience of French Left – Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, was an early left critic of Marxist totalitarianism. He had been a member of the Communist Party of France and the Communist Party of Algeria in the 1930s but rejected both the philosophy and reality of what Communism meant when it became the state ideology in the Soviet Union.
In Good Company: 📘🎬📺 Read it before you watch it: every book adaptation coming in 2027 and beyond – British reader and “soon-to-be-bookseller”, Sam Burgess highlights forthcoming “films, series and the ones still in development, plus what to watch before Christmas and New Year”.
The Butler Did It: 🍂🕵️♀️ The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep by Catherine Louisa Pirkis – “Although there isn’t a bad season in which to read mysteries, there is absolutely a best season, and we’re in it. The dark creeps in earlier each evening and there is a sharpness in the air on even the sunniest of days. It’s fall, the perfect season for murder.” With that in mind, Brooke Holgerson examines female detectives in Victorian era fiction, the lady detective Loveday Brooke in particular and C.L. Pirkis’s short story, The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep (1893).
Heist: 🎤 “There is a lie in the book”: Vincenzo Latronico on Perfection – The Italian author speaks to Sanders Isaac Bernstein about his Berlin-based novel Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes), “now adapted for the Volksbühne stage.” You are required to login with your email to read the full article. 🔑
Books and Bits: 🎤📕 INTERVIEW: James Marriott on cognitive junk food, ‘the 400-word wall’ and reading as an identity – Pandora Sykes talks to “the Times columnist, literary critic and author” of The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and The Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
Three little AIs are we: 🤖🤖🤖
London Review of Books: 📚📖 Non-Reading Rooms – “Knowledge produced through public institutions such as the British Library is being enclosed by AI companies and publishing oligopolies that flog it back to us in summary form. The BL is being transformed into desk space for hire by people unlikely to be reading at all”, reveals Paul Rekret.
Wired: ✍️⚒️ Authors Can Defend Against AI Allegations With ‘Paper Trail’ Tools. Is It Enough? – “As the publishing industry wrestles with paranoia over the provenance of manuscripts, writers are caught in an impossible bind”, finds Miles Klee.
Khaleej Times: 🎤 SIBF 2026: Does AI really pose a threat [to] writing? Booker winner Daisy Rockwell weighs in – Daisy Rockwell, winner of the International Booker Prize in 2022 “with Geetanjali Shree for translating the latter’s epic novel Tomb of Sand, says while AI has entered literature, its role in producing quality translations remains suspect”, writes Anamika Chatterjee.
Taipei Times: Translated fiction is a booming business in the UK – “A rare bright spot in the publishing industry, literature in translation is on the rise as younger people look beyond their own borders and thirst for other cultures”, writes Andrew Dickson.
Who Even Reads: 🍂 Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in November 2026 – “It’s a slow month for book releases but [Lisa Butts and Elisabeth Cook] looked far and wide to find the most exciting new books coming out anyway […]. Fortunately, the ones [they] found look really, really good.”
Herald Online Chronicle: Swedish scholar finds literary connections in Bulawayo – “Swedish author, journalist, librarian and cultural enthusiast Karolina Jeppson says her recent research visit to Bulawayo has deepened her appreciation of the city’s literary landscape, community libraries and the role of local languages in preserving cultural identity.”
Books of Titans: Books: Physical, eBook, or Clay Tablet? – “Imagine that you came across a work of literature so compelling that you wanted to preserve it for the next 4,000 years. Which format would you select to preserve the story?” asks Erik Rostad.
The Conversation: 🗣️ From Wales to Finland, minority language speakers still face prejudice – “‘How very rude to be speaking Welsh.’” This was the comment of a stranger “directed at Patsy, a Welsh learner” when she was overheard chatting to her family in a Cardiff café. The incident features in Kaisa Pankakoski’s latest book, Multilingual Family Language Policy and Wellbeing and, as she goes on to explain in this article, her research with Welsh-speaking families has revealed a generational shift, while experiences in Finland show the problem is not unique to Wales.
The Critic (via Archive Today): 📜🪶⚤ John Betjeman – “Betjeman’s gay side seldom manifested itself poetically. The exception was an unpublished piece of silliness, Sweets and Cake, which was discovered in 2019.” Alexander Larman on the “witty, fun-loving bisexual poet whose sunny public persona hid a complicated romantic life”.
The Brussels Times: 🕵️♂️ Why did Agatha Christie make Hercule Poirot Belgian? New exhibition offers clues – “Belgian refugees who fled to Britain during the First World War may have inspired Agatha Christie to create Hercule Poirot, one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time”, reveals Julian Hale.
Türkiye Today: 🦄🗣️ Languages of fantasy worlds: The real grammar behind Elvish and Dothraki – “Qapla! The word rumbles out of the throat like a challenge, a warrior’s farewell wishing success. It sounds nothing like English, and that is exactly the point.”
Reading in Transit: 📚📖 An Ode to Waterstones – “Many bookshops have cafés. I honestly think one of the things that made me the reader I am today was that my family found one, and made it matter to us.” We discover how this reader’s “trips to a long-gone Waterstones turned books into a core part of [their] identity”.
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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. >>