What are you reading this week?
Updated: Aug 15, 2022
I’m working my way through “Legacy of Violence. A History of the British Empire” by Caroline Elkins. I saw it recommended on Twitter and bought it.
This is really essential reading for me, as I’m writing about the Famine in 19th century Ireland. From what I’m learning, the background of British colonialism and Empire seeped into everything at that time and right into the twentieth, even the twenty-first, century. It was a corrupting force that used violence to bend the colonised all across the world to the will of British politicians. The colonised were usually Black or Brown people, but also Irish people,
I am also planning to write a novel around the Irish Declaration of Independence in April 1916 and the Civil War in Ireland.
In "Legacy of Violence" I read that the Black and Tans and Churchill’s Auxiliary forces, when they had finished with Ireland, were then sent to Palestine to uphold the Balfour Declaration. We can see how that turned out in the twenty-first century.
It’s amazing how insidious violence became when politicians were trying to hold the global British Empire together at all costs.
I’m only on page 151 out of 685, so I’ll keep reading. It might take a week or two more to finish reading it.
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My second book is a library book that I read over the weekend.
Oh, wouldn't I love to see my novel in a library! Hopefully, I will one day!
“The Funeral Owl” by Jim Kelly, is a crime novel. I love the characters in this novel. Even the secondary characters, for example, Humph, the cabbie, and his teenage daughter, are complex and engaging people. The plotting is skillfully done and everyone seems to be touched in some way by the crime at the centre of the novel. This is just one in the Phillip Dryden series by Jim Kelly, so I might look up another book.
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I have two more books waiting for me. One from the Historical Novel Society, to review, and another by a writing friend, Elaine Ramsay, “Violet Eyes.”
Looking forward to reading both.
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Thank you for your visit, while you're here, take a few minutes to:
1. Click on the Contact page on www.bridgetsjournal.com/ Say hello, and I’ll send you a free pdf of the first chapter of my latest novel.
2. Buy 'Daughters of the Famine Road,' on Amazon in paperback or Kindle ebook. https://rotf.lol/Famine-Road
3. Look out for the next novel in the trilogy:'Daughters in Exile' coming soon.