Winding Up the Week #476

An end of week recap “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” – Virginia Woolf (The Waves) It is Bowdler’s Day, when we honour the man behind a notorious literary tidy‑up – a reminder that one well‑meant edit can slip, so easily, into cultural mischief. Then on Sunday we can honour Malala Yousafzai by reading one of her books for Malala Day. Please cut the birthday cake for Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora (1561), American writer E.B. White (1899), English children’s writer Helen Creswell (1934), Indian-born novelist Amitav Ghosh (1956), British-American author Jhumpa Lahiri (1967), Korean-American author Min Jin Lee (1968) and Chinese-American SFF author Marie Lu (1984). You can clear the crumbs and serve jelly with ice cream on Sunday for…