Book Club #1: October
Bookshop Day, Black History Month reads and book club faves
Autumn, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, is about
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.('Day in Autumn', trans. Mary Kinzie)
And so here I am in October, drafting the Goodenough Book Club's first newsletter to you all.
Today, Oct 14, is Bookshop Day in the UK! In this neighbourhood, we are spoilt for bookshops. My personal favourite is Word on the Water on Regent's Canal - how can you not love a bookshop on a boat? - but there's also Skoob in the Brunswick for all your secondhand needs; the iconic Gay's The Word, the UK's oldest LGBTQ+ bookshop; the esteemed London Review Bookshop; the antiquarian bookseller Jarndyce opposite the British Museum, straight out of a Dickens novel; the 100-year-old Atlantis Bookshop for books on magic and the occult; and many more. Visit an independent bookshop today!
What's up
Norwegian author Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature
Salman Rushdie will publish a memoir, Knife, about his stabbing
What's on
The London Literature Festival (Southbank Centre, Oct 18 to 29) - speakers include Sir Patrick Stewart, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jacqueline Wilson, Teju Cole and Yu Miri
Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (British Library, Oct 27 to Feb 25) - an exhibition on fantasy worlds from Middle-earth to Pan's Labyrinth
Susan Cooper and Natalie Haynes in conversation (British Library, Oct 27) - The Dark Is Rising author chats with the Pandora's Jar mythologist
What's out
Two upcoming titles I wanted to highlight this Black History Month are Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward's new novel about slavery (I'm a few chapters in and it's already astounding) and Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, translated from French by Sam Taylor, an adventure story set in 18th-century Senegal. I was blown away by At Night All Blood is Black, Diop's novel about WWI Senegalese tirailleurs, so I have high hopes for his latest.
Something lighter: The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon, an enemies-to-lovers arranged marriage fantasy romance. It's basically Star Wars fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, but it's interesting how the world-building draws on Filipino myth and culture.
Jhumpa Lahiri has insisted on writing only in Italian for nearly a decade now; her new short fiction collection, Roman Stories, is out now in an English translation by her and Todd Portnowitz. More on Lahiri later!
For the word nerds: The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, about the volunteers who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary (including three murderers, a pornographer and Karl Marx's daughter). I'm very charmed by this irrepressible NYT review (caveat: the reviewer, Dr Dennis Duncan, is at the UCL English Department, like me).
In the Club
At our inaugural book club meeting, members from around the world shared about their favourite books. Here's a round-up for your towering TBR piles:
Sudarshan from India recommends...The Constitution of India
Mario from Guatemala recommends...El Señor Presidente by Miguel Ángel Asturias
Pop from Thailand recommends...Princess Bari by Hwang Sok-yong
Khairin from Malaysia recommends...The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
Elisabetta from Italy and Sannidi from Mauritius both recommend...Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Leo from Australia recommends...Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman
Louisa from Armenia recommends...East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Varun from Canada recommends...Ru by Kim Thúy
Eduardo from Mexico recommends...The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rabia from Pakistan recommends...The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Abby recommends...Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Roman from Ukraine recommends...Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski
Sayeh from Canada recommends...Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
Tolu from Nigeria recommends...Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge
Harinad from India recommends...The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi
Miriam from Germany recommends...Identitti by Mithu Sanyal
Olivia from Singapore recommends...Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Next up...
We'll be reading 'The Third and Final Continent' by Jhumpa Lahiri (I did say we'd see her again!) for our meeting on Wed, Oct 18, at 8pm. (Thanks Varun for the rec!) Do get in touch with Miriam, Sayeh or me if you would like to suggest a short story for the book club. In the meantime, do sign up on The Square!
Happy reading,
Olivia
(I'm on Instagram with more book reviews - @ohomatopoeia)