My Week in Books – 15th March 2020

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I joined the blog tour for Distorted Days by Louise Worthington sharing my review.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Authors With A Fun Social Media Presenceand I had a bit of fun imagining how authors from the past might have used social media.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…and have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading. I also participated in the blog tour for The Treadstone Resurrection by Joshua Hood, featuring an extract from the book.

Thursday – I published my review of The Recovery of Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel.

Friday – I shared my thoughts on Summer of the Three Pagodas by Jean Moran.

Saturday – I introduced my Buchan of the Month – The Lodge in the Wilderness by John Buchan.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.

New arrivals

Just two, both books for blog tours. 

Outlook-ecmtvntnLiving Among the Dead: My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength by Adena Bernstein Astrowsky (ebook, courtesy of Amsterdam Publishers and Random Things Tours)

This is the story of one remarkable young woman’s unimaginable journey through the rise of the Nazi regime, the Second World War, and the aftermath. Mania Lichtenstein’s dramatic story of survival is narrated by her granddaughter and her memories are interwoven with beautiful passages of poetry and personal reflection. Holocaust survivor Mania Lichtenstein used writing as a medium to deal with the traumatic effects of the war.

Many Jews did not die in concentration camps, but were murdered in their lifelong communities, slaughtered by mass killing units, and then buried in pits. As a young girl, Mania witnessed the horrors while doing everything within her power to subsist. She lived in Włodzimierz, north of Lvov (Ukraine), was interned for three years in the labor camp nearby, managed to escape and hid in the forests until the end of the war.

Although she was the sole survivor of her family, Mania went on to rebuild a new life in the United States, with a new language and new customs, always carrying with her the losses of her family and her memories.

Nearly eighty years after liberation, we are still witnessing acts of cruelty born out of hatred and discrimination. Living among the Dead reminds us of the beautiful communities that existed before WWII, the lives lost and those that lived on, and the importance to never forget these stories so that history does not repeat itself.

I Am DustI Am Dust by Louise Beech (ebook, courtesy of Orenda Books and Random Things Tours)

The Dean Wilson Theatre is believed to be haunted by a long-dead actress, singing her last song, waiting for her final cue, looking for her killer…

Now Dust, the iconic musical, is returning after twenty years. But who will be brave enough to take on the role of ghostly goddess Esme Black, last played by Morgan Miller, who was murdered in her dressing room?

Theatre usher Chloe Dee is caught up in the spectacle. As the new actors arrive, including an unexpected face from her past, everything changes. Are the eerie sounds and sightings backstage real or just her imagination? Is someone playing games? Is the role of Esme Black cursed? Could witchcraft be at the heart of the tragedy? And are dark deeds from Chloe’s past about to catch up with her?

Not all the drama takes place onstage. Sometimes murder, magic, obsession and the biggest of betrayals are real life. When you’re in the theatre shadows, you see everything. And Chloe has been watching…

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Audiobook Review: Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
  • Top Ten Tuesday: Spring 2020 TBR
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • Book Review: A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Containment by Vanda Symon

#BuchanOfTheMonth Introducing…A Lodge in the Wilderness by John Buchan

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My Buchan of the Month for March is A Lodge in the Wilderness. It was published by Blackwood on 14th November 1906, initially anonymously. It was only for the second impression in February 1907 that John Buchan was credited as the author. When the Nelson edition was published in 1917, its preface was signed with the initials “JB” and dated “British Army in France, December 1916”.

20200314_134401Buchan had begun working on the book in 1905. It takes the form of a symposium in which, through various fictional characters, he expresses some of his own views on the British Empire, based partly on his experiences in South Africa with Lord Alfred Milner. Buchan’s motivation for writing the book can be gleaned from the introduction to the 1916 ‘cheap’ edition in which he expressed the view that “certain larger matters which did not truly belong to party politics were in danger of being obscured and degraded”.

The setting of the book is Musuru, a lavish home built by ‘an intelligent millionaire’ nine thousand feet up on the East African plateau. Janet Adam Smith, Buchan’s first biographer, describes the house, with its library containing 62,000 volumes, as combining ‘civilization with wildness’. Readers familiar with John Buchan’s works will recognise the thin line between those two conditions as a regular feature of his novels.

The cast of characters includes a former Prime Minister, a former Viceroy of India, a big-game hunter, a famous explorer, a well-travelled journalist and a financier. Predictably perhaps, the latter is Jewish although Janet Adam Smith, conscious of accusations of anti-Semitism directed at Buchan’s writing, argues that it is a sympathetic portrait. A number of married women (without their spouses) are included in the company. Janet Adam Smith describes their portrayal as relatively emancipated for the time (although her main examples are that they are pictured smoking and ‘adventuring’ ) and notes their views are listened to seriously by the male characters.

Although nominally fictional, Janet Adam Smith observes ‘Spotting the originals of the characters was one of the pleasures of the book for its first readers‘. John Buchan himself is represented by Hugh Somerville, ‘a young man of thirty’ and the real life model for Lady Flora Brume is Susan Grosvenor, later to become Mrs. Buchan.

For David Daniell, A Lodge in the Wilderness is ‘an extraordinary book’, characterizing it as ‘a little bit of Wells, with a pinch of Shaw…a Fabian urgency…some Kiplingesque poetry, strong Meridithian influence, a Balliol tone, a Hegelian structure and a mixture of dialogue and lengthy address‘. Look out for my review later this month to see if I agree – not that I’m very familiar with ‘Meridithian influence’ or ‘Hegelian structure’!

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)

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