Category: 6Degrees

#6Degrees Six Degrees of Separation: From What I Loved to Meet Me at the Museum

whatcathyreadnext17 Comments

It’s the first Saturday of a new month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

pile of hardbound books with white and pink floral ceramic teacup and saucer
Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees

9780340682388This month’s starting book is What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt which I’ve not read but, according to the blurb, it’s the story of a life-long friendship between two men set in the art world of New York.

Also opening in the art world of New York is Fake Like Me by Babs Bourland. After a fire in her New York studio, a young artist gains a place at Pine City, an exclusive but rather creepy retreat set on a lake. It’s run by a notorious collective of successful artists, one of whose members has recently died.

Another book that features a young woman leaving New York to travel to a remote lakeside location and experiencing more than she bargained for is The Room by the Lake by Emma Dibdin. 

In Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews becomes involved in the search for a young white boy lost on the vast Lake Caddo in east Texas. The title of the book is from a blues song.

Songs, in this case by The Beatles, are the inspiration for the titles of Alan Johnson’s series of memoirs. In The Long and Winding Road he charts his rise from postman to positions in the highest levels of the UK government.

Staying with the postal theme, The Lost Letters of William Woolf by Helen Cullen concerns a so-called letter detective employed in the Dead Letters Depot who spends his days trying to reunite lost letters with their intended recipients.

Meet Me At the Museum by Ann Youngson is an epistolary novel in which two people, Danish Professor Anders Larsen and East Anglian farmer’s wife, Tina Hopgood, conduct a long distance correspondence as a result of a shared interest in the Tollund Man.

This month we’ve travelled from New York to Denmark (in letter form, at least). Where did your chain take you this month?

Fake Like MeTheRoombytheLakeHeaven My HomeThe Long and Winding RoadThe Lost Letters of William WoolfMeet Me at the Museum

#6Degrees 6 Degrees of Separation: From Normal People to Chanel’s Riviera

whatcathyreadnext11 Comments

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees

9780571334650This month’s starting book is Normal People by Sally Rooney which I’ve not read (I must be the last person in the world not to have done so) but have heard a lot about, not least because of the recent TV adaptation. It’s about two people who meet at Trinity College Dublin.

Shadowplay AudiobookThe mention of Dublin takes me to Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor, shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2020. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Along the way Stoker encounters a number of famous figures, including Oscar Wilde whom he first meets in Dublin.

The Secrets of Primrose SquareAlso set in the Irish capital is The Secrets of Primrose Square by Claudia Carroll. The book takes the reader inside the lives of a number of characters living in a small square in Dublin.

TheseDividingWallsAnother book which focuses on a community living in close proximity is These Dividing Walls by Fran Cooper. The setting this time is a Paris apartment block during a long hot summer of unrest in the capital.

Paris EchoUnsurprisingly, Paris is also the location for Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks. In the book, one of the main characters has returned to the French capital to research the experiences of women who lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War 2.

CountessA Countess in Limbo: Diaries in War & Revolution by Olga Hendrikoff chronicles her experiences of living in Russia at the outbreak of World War 1 and in occupied Paris during World War 2.

Chanels RivieraFinally, Chanel’s Riviera by Anne de Courcy also depicts the experiences of people in World War 2 but this time those, such as designer Coco Chanel, whose previously privileged and glamorous lives were transformed in an instant following the fall of France.

Paris and Dublin have been our locations this time. Where did your chain take you this month?