An end of week recap
“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”
– Pablo Neruda (born 12th July 1904)
There are several notable literary birthdays occurring today, among them: American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher and leading transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau (1817), Polish Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz (1892), Canadian historian, writer, journalist and broadcaster, Pierre Berton (1920), Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih (1929), American crime novelist, Donald E. Westlake (1933) and Lebanese novelist and literary critic, Elias Khoury (1948). Next week, we remember the death of Jane Austen on 18th July 1817.
An assortment of national and international celebrations unconnected with the literary world are currently taking place, such as World Rum Day, New Conversations Day, National Different Coloured Eyes Day, Great British Pea Week and, partial as I am to Italian cuisine I was pleased to learn it is Lasagna Awareness Month. Not that I wasn’t already… Aware, that is.
As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my 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 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.
* Typically Tovian! *
As part of the ongoing Tove Trove project, I shared a few reflections on Fair Play, Tove Jansson’s “happy tales about two women”, first published in 1989. I chose to reread it at this point at the suggestion of Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book who persuaded me it was “a great accompaniment” or follow-up to Notes from an Island. He was right. Thank you, Simon. >> Read: All’s Fair in Love and Work >>
* Almost Overlooked *
Last November, Mallika Ramachandran of Literary Potpourri shared her thoughts on Antoine Laurain’s Parisian romance, The Red Notebook. The tale of a bookseller finding an abandoned handbag on the street (containing “a little red notebook”) belonging to a woman who was mugged when “returning home after dinner with friends” one night, is that of “two people between whom fate […] leads to a serendipitous connection”. This “absolutely wonderful and charming book”, in which love is “central but done in a rather subtle and unique way,” captured [Mallika’s] heart”. Not normally a reader of romantic fiction, she found this “unconventional book” a “feel-good read” and one that brought a smile to her face. If this appeals to you, I suggest you check out her post for the full review at Book Review: The Red Notebook (2014) by Antoine Laurain (trans Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken).
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with you a couple of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented writers producing high-quality book features and reviews, which made it difficult to pick only these two – both published in the last few weeks:
“Doubtful Against the Gulf”: Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus – Canadian reader, professor and critic, Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings, focused an academic eye on Rumer Godden’s third novel, Black Narcissus (first published in 1939) after having her interest piqued by Margaret Drabble in the TLS. Set in a windswept convent high in the Himalayas, the story belongs partly “to the genre of the ‘nun novel,’ if there is such a thing,” but also fits into the “broader category of novels about struggles between faith and feeling, […] empire” and “Englishwomen abroad.” The sisters “begin their mission full of confidence” but find the isolated beauty and “sheer drama of the views from their new home distracting” – then there are “human distractions” in the form of “charming” agent, Mr. Dean. There are of course, consequences. Please read Rohan’s detailed review for more.
All Passion Spent – Over at Just Reading A Book, Jane looks back at Vita Sackville-West’s 1931 classic novel All Passion Spent – a tale of the recently widowed eighty-eight-year-old Lady Slane and the manner in which she defies her family and ultimately rids “herself of the possessions and society that she doesn’t want or need”, so she can “cherish all that she finds truly important.” Described here as “a novella that “twinkles with humour” and delights “in the unexpected”, it is an “insightful and irreverent” book in which the protagonist “enjoys annoying […] ghastly people”. It is a “thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying read”, says Jane, which is essentially about “being old but [with a newly developed sense of] wisdom and clarity.”
* Irresistible Items *
Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally 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, here are a selection of interesting snippets:
****************************
Spectator Australia: The Coromandel coast under threat – Philip Marsden writes: “The rich biodiversity of Chennai’s littoral is in imminent danger from toxic petrochemical industries, warns the ardent naturalist and activist Yuvan Aves”, author of Intertidal: The Hidden World Between Land and Sea.
Publishers Weekly: Miriam Toews’s True Story – “In her first memoir in two decades,” Canadian author Miriam Toews “looks back on the writing life and family tragedies with grace and subtle humor” in A Truce That Is Not Peace, says Louisa Ermelino.
A Narrative Of Their Own: The Freedom of the Female Artist – In her weekly piece “exploring the lives and literature of women”, Kate Jones delves into one of her “all-time favourite novels”, Kate Chopin’s 1899 feminist classic, The Awakening.
Southwest Review: An Orgiastic Outburst of Violence and Bloodshed | Evelio Rosero’s House of Fury – Set on a single Friday evening on 10th April 1970 in a large Bogotá mansion, Colombian writer and journalist Evelio Rosero’s House of Fury is the shocking story of a planned family celebration gone awry.
Yale Climate Connections: Books about climate and the deep blue sea – “These books”, says Michael Svoboda, “celebrate the mystery of Earth’s oceans and tally humanity’s deepening impacts on them.”
The Bookseller: At the Helm: Decades in the making, Sarah Hall’s new novel takes shape – “The more I researched all these stories, the more I thought [Helm] could be a really funny character, because wind demons were considered to be perverts in King James I’s Demonology”, says British novelist Sarah Hall in her interview with Lauren Brown.
Writing.ie: AWAKE: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination – Ben Simmons finds Mark Vernon’s AWAKE! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination “is a celebration of Blake’s genius and a practical guide for living with greater awareness, creativity, and hope.”
Sunday Times ZA: ‘Three Wild Dogs’ will have you in stitches – and tears – In Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth), Australian German author Markus Zusak writes movingly about the dogs he and his family rescued and “whose antics often caused mayhem” while also providing excellent “memoir material”.
The Joy of Old Books: Love Among the Tulips – The Chauffeur and the Chaperon by the “brilliant Edwardian double act”, Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson is, says Harriet, a “summer romance on the Dutch waterways”.
People: Elizabeth Gilbert’s New Memoir All the Way to the River Explores ‘Darker Side of Spiritual, Emotional and Physical Hunger’ (Exclusive) – “In 2000, Elizabeth met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.” Elizabeth Gilbert returns with All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, an emotionally fuelled new memoir.
The Critic: Balancing the books – Henry Jeffreys on “disappointing dealings with Unbound, a publisher that collapsed whilst owing authors money.” Also, well worth reading on this matter is Jan Hicks’ opinion piece: Random Thoughts: The Undoing of Unbound.
Read the Classics: Round-up – New Classics, July 2025 – Henry Eliot with a selection ranging from “Brainard and Carrington to Sternberg and Sundström”.
Frontline: Reading is good when it disturbs you: Amitava Kumar – Indian writer and journalist, Amitava Kumar talks “Coetzee, Naipaul, and the kind of books that don’t comfort but leave a mark” – Majid Maqbool asks the questions.
IndieReader: The Last Whaler – Dan Accardi describes Cynthia Reeves’ historical novel, The Last Whaler, as a “tense, gripping, […] beautiful, […] powerful tale of losing and re-discovering one’s humanity through the crucible of grief.”
Liberties: Unsentimental Education: Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance – Jared Marcel Pollen on the long-overlooked opus by Peter Weiss, his three-volume bildungsroman, The Aesthetics of Resistance.
Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books: Wonderland by Tracy Farr – Paula Morris on a “lyrical novel [that] imagines Marie Curie in Miramar, in an ‘age of discovery and marvels’”.
Quanta Magazine: New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection – In an article published earlier this year, Steve Nadis writes: “The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.”
Reveries in the Warren: Dostoevsky and The Devil: The Influence of The Gothic on Fyodor M. Dostoevsky – Chloe on “The Devils and White Nights: Russian Romanticism”.
Ancillary Review of Books: All That You Touch, You Change: The Life and Legacy of Octavia E. Butler – Almost twenty years after the death of American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Helena Ramsaroop examines a selection of books “that reveal more information about her life”, allow the reader to “have a deeper understanding of who Butler was” and encourage them “to think more critically about her stories.”
The Arts Fuse: Book Review: “The Slip” — An Epic Exploration of the Elasticity of Identity – Clea Simon tells us Lucas Schaefer’s boxing novel, The Slip, “raises issues of race and entitlement, as well as the malleability of identity, all in one big, sloppy, and occasionally gorgeous package.”
Economical with Fiction: Was Miss Jean Brodie so unlikely? – In this piece on Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, E.J. Barnes discovers a “strange brew of Edinburgh gentility, Mussolini and golf … and an unlikely Trainspotting connection”.
The Mit Press Reader: What Designers Can Learn from Magic Realism – In an excerpt from Not Here, Not Now Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby argue that “magic realism may be what we need to break free from design’s overly rational futures.”
Letters from the Inbetween: Thinking Erasure In African Literature – tòlú Daniel reviews Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, a Senegalese detective novel about an investigation into the disappearance of a mysterious author.
The Sociological Review: Russia in Four Criminals by Federico Varese – “Federico Varese’s Russia in Four Criminals offers a masterclass on how personal biographies can illuminate broader social, political and economic forces. Varese shows us how individual stories can reveal deeper truths about society,” says Baris Cayli Messina.
Service95: July’s Must-Reads: What Team Service95 Can’t Put Down Right Now – Selected by Team Service95, we are told: “This month’s buzziest books live up to the hype [and] whether you’re poolside or hiding from the heat, these are the reads your summer needs.”
The Scotsman: He gave her a one star review. She ruined his life. A Fringe performer turns the tables on a critic. – Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel Bring the House Down draws on her time as a Festival reviewer and captures the fraught and funny frenzy of the city in August”, finds Janet Christie.
Women Writing the World: What You Should Know about the Author of The Secret Garden – “She’s not what [Canadian author, Lilian Nattel] expected!”
The AU Review: The AU’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025: July – September – “Assassins, gorgons, greyhounds and calico cats all feature in this quarter’s most anticipated list,” says Jess Gately, so “buckle in for a July, August and September full of heart-wrenching and gut-punching stories filled with rage, despair, and ultimately, hope.”
The New York Times: How to Organize Your Digital Library – “If the e-book app on your phone or tablet is overflowing and full of outdated files,” J. D. Biersdorfer suggests you “use these tools to tidy it up.”
The Duck-Billed Reader: A Mysterious Death: Metaphor and Science in Bleak House – “What is the meaning of the gruesome death of an illiterate hoarder in Bleak House, and why did it lead to a fight between Charles Dickens and his friend George Lewes?” Claire Laporte investigates.
N+1: New TV Novels – “Not literature, but dramaturgy”. Lisa Borst argues that “novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind”.
LSE: Page and port – discovering Hamburg’s book scene – “In this bookshop guide, Christiane Müller takes us on a tour of the best literary hubs in Hamburg.”
Literary Ladies Guide: Out from Scott’s Shadow: Zelda Fitzgerald’s quest for creative autonomy – In her introduction to this guest piece by Elodie Barnes, Nava Atlas describes Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as having a “toxic, competitive relationship that did neither of them any good”.
The University Times: My Room is Collapsing Under the Weight of Paperback – “Lily Braumberger writes about hoarding books as a metaphor for growth and stagnation.”
Public Books: Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic – “The first thing you should know about Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is that it is a beautiful book and you should stop reading this right now to go get a copy of it if you don’t already have one.” Gabriel N. Rosenberg describes the American environmental historian as “a damned interesting person to interview.”
The New York Times (via DNYUZ): How Literature Lost Its Mojo – David Brooks says he’s “old enough to remember when novelists were big-time.” When he “was in college in the 1980s” new novels from respected writers were “cultural events.” Not so these days!
Volumes.: The Rise and Fall of Genius: Part I – Matthew Morgan on Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s novel, Chess “and the formation of greatness.”
Sàigòn News: Finnish Literature Week opens in Hanoi – “The Finnish Literature Week officially opened in Hanoi on July 11, offering Vietnamese readers an opportunity to explore Finland’s rich literary heritage through a diverse program of artistic and educational activities.”
Eurozine: The art of despair – Syrian writer, journalist, political dissident and prominent intellectual voice of the Syrian Revolution, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, speaks to Esprit “about his political philosophy as well as his hopes and concerns for the future of Syrian democracy after the fall of the Assad regime.”
Sumauma: Véronique Tadjo: ‘Urbanites are disconnected from death’ – “The author of In the Company of Men has always enjoyed Africa’s diverse nature, but in 2014 that world was rocked by Ebola, in a terrifying epidemic that cannot simply be forgotten”.
Swissinfo.ch: Literary world celebrates centenary of Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet – “The centenary of the Swiss poet and translator Philippe Jaccottet, winner of both the Schiller and Goncourt literary prizes, is being marked by new editions of his work and seminars in Rome and Geneva”, reports Mariella Radaelli.
Tokyo Weekender: The Most Beautiful Libraries in Japan – Eugenie Shin with a tantalising selection of “must-visit landmarks for bookworms and art lovers”.
The Hedgehog Review: A Tale of Two Westerns – “The harsh violence of Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove draw us in more than it repels, and the proximity of death makes the actions of its dramatis personae only more vivid and compelling to us”, says David Polansky.
The Guardian: Inside the Salt Path controversy: ‘Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented’ – “Raynor Winn’s bestselling book is far from the first time a true story has been called into question after publication. But how does it happen? And should readers really feel betrayed?” asks Lucy Knight.
Collider: George R.R. Martin Finally Delivers Good News About ‘The Winds of Winter’ – Chris McPherson reports: “It’s the update Game of Thrones fans have [been awaiting] for over a decade.” George R.R. Martin has finally confirmed that The Winds of Winter is not only progressing — it’s officially going to be the longest book” in the series.
****************************
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 expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.
Categories: Winding Up the Week
