Discussion posts – Page 21 – What Cathy Read Next…

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

This month’s starting book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Subtitled ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’, in the book the author argues that it is time to look at commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are.

Gyles Brandreth takes a similarly non-nonsense attitude in his book Have You Eaten Grandma? which is described as a ‘brilliantly funny tirade on grammar…[and] the linguistic horrors of our times’.

Gyles’ son, Benet Brandreth, as well as being an authority on Shakespeare is also a novelist. His series of historical novels that started with The Spy of Venice and continued with The Assassin of Verona imagine what William Shakespeare might have got up to in his so-called “lost years”.

I’m not going to go for the obvious link to Hamnet as I used that last month. Instead, my next link is to another book set in Venice, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The film version starred Dirk Bogarde (as pictured below on the cover of the Penguin edition). Bogarde, as well as being an award-winning actor, was an accomplished author and in his book, Great Meadow, he recalls his idyllic childhood in Sussex in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Also set in the years before the Second World War is All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison. Set on a farm in Suffolk it features a girl on the cusp of adulthood. It made the ‘Academy Recommends’ list but not the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

A book that did make the longlist was The Wanderers by Tim Pears, the second book in his West Country trilogy featuring young Leo Sercombe who falls in with a band of gypsies and travels the countryside with them, and then later on his own.

My chain has taken me from proponents of precision in punctuation to a book featuring a much less rules-based way of life. Where did your chain take you?

Top 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 Anticipated Releases of the Second Half of 2021. Here’s my list – and this is just the ones in my TBR pile, physical or digital! Links from the titles will take you to the full book description on Goodreads.

July

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri – From the bestselling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, a powerful story about love, loss, hope and courage, set in the lush forests of Cyprus.
Cecily by Annie Garthwaite – Told through the eyes of its greatest unseen protagonist, this astonishing debut plunges you into the blood and exhilaration of the first days of the Wars of the Roses, a war as women fight it.

August

The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan – 1822, Edinburgh is abuzz with rumours of King George IV’s impending visit. In botanical circles, however, a different kind of excitement has gripped the city. In the newly-installed Botanic Garden, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower – an event which only occurs once in several decades.
A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz – the third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz
A Corruption of Blood by Ambrose Parry – the third in the historical crime series set in 19th century Edinburgh

September

The Hidden Child by Louise Fein – Inspired by the author’s personal experience, The Hidden Child illuminates the moral and ethical issues of an era shaped by xenophobia, prejudice, fear, and well-intentioned yet flawed science
The Late Train to Gipsy Hill by Alan Johnson – Each day, Gary watches as a woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman invites him to take the empty seat beside her, holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words ‘HELP ME’ scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass.
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks – Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and hides its face from the coming of another, Snow Country is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope.

October

A Woman Made of Snow by Elisabeth Gifford – A gorgeous, haunting and captivating novel of a century-long family mystery in the wilds of Scotland, and one woman’s hunt for the truth.
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout – The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life

What forthcoming books are you eagerly anticipating?