Category: Discussion posts

#TopTenTuesday Most Recent Additions To My Bookshelf

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Top Ten Tuesday newTop Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Most Recent Additions To My Bookshelf. My list includes new arrivals on my physical and digital bookshelves. Links from the book titles will take you to the full book description on Goodreads.

Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts (paperback, giveaway prize courtesy of Quercus) – “A richly imagined novel that tells the story behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book that inspired the iconic film, through the eyes of author L. Frank Baum’s intrepid wife, Maud”

Wild Spinning Girls by Carol Lovekin (e-book, published by Honno Press) – “If it wasn’t haunted before she came to live there, after she died, Ty’r Cwmwl made room for her ghost”

Distorted Days by Louise Worthington (e-book) – “an exquisitely written account of the ways in which life can knock you off our feet – and how you can pick yourself up again.”

Stasi Winter by David Young (paperback, published by Zaffre) – “In 1978 East Germany, nothing is as it seems…”

A Messy Affair by Elizabeth Mundy (e-book, published by Constable) – Hungarian cleaner, Lena Szarka, investigates a suspicious death

Real Life by Adeline Dieudonne (paperback, published by World Editions) – a “gripping, dark coming of age novel”

When We Fall by Carolyn Kirby (review copy courtesy of No Exit) -“published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day, a moving story of three lives forever altered by one fatal choice”

The Convalescent Corpse by Nicola Slade (e-book, giveaway prize courtesy of the author) – “A story of family, rationing and inconvenient corpses”

The Other You by J.S. Monroe (e-book, published by Head of Zeus) – “Is he who you think he is?”

The Bermondsey Bookshop by Mary Gibson (e-book, published by Head of Zeus) – “Set in 1920s London, the inspiring story of Kate Goss’s struggle against poverty, hunger and cruel family secrets”

Buchan of the Month: Sir Quixote of the Moors by John Buchan #ReadJB2020

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Appropriately, perhaps, my first Buchan of the Month for 2020 is John Buchan’s first published novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors. You can find out more about the project and my reading list for 2020 here. What follows is an introduction to Sir Quixote of the Moors.   I will be publishing my review of the book later this month.

20200118_131258Sir Quixote of the Moors was published by T Fisher Unwin in the UK and by Henry Holt & Co in the US in October 1895, by which time Buchan was in his first year at Brasenose College, Oxford to which he had won a scholarship. He had started writing the book whilst in his last year at Glasgow University and the book is dedicated to his tutor, Gilbert Murray.

In early signs of the industrious nature which would be his lifelong habit, Janet Adam Smith, Buchan’s first biographer, quotes him recording, “I would do a few sentences in the morning while waiting for breakfast, a few more at the Union, and more at night in the intervals of my College work.”

Janet Adam Smith reports Buchan was annoyed his publisher changed the title from simply Sir Quixote, adding ‘of the Moors’ apparently to fall into line with the fashion in titles at the time. He was even more annoyed when his US publisher changed the ending quite fundamentally!

Although detecting echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona or Kidnapped (Buchan was an ardent admirer of Stevenson), Adam Smith is unimpressed with the book describing its construction as ‘rather clumsy’ and the writing ‘rather precious’. Buchan scholar, David Daniell, is a little more generous, describing it as ‘a little masterpiece’ praising the balance ‘between motion and stillness, between wild and temperate weather, between outdoor and indoor, harsh and beautiful, older and younger, male and female’.

No sales figures are available for the book and at the time Janet Adam Smith’s biography of John Buchan was published in 1965, Sir Quixote of the Moors was one of the few Buchan novels not to have been published in paperback.

Sources:

Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])
David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)
Kenneth Hillier and Michael Ross, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Illustrated Biography (Avonworld, 2008)