Tag: 6Degrees

#6Degrees Of Separation: From Rodham by Curtis Sittenfield to Foe by J.M. Coetzee

whatcathyreadnext17 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

This month’s starting book is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld in which the author imagines what might have happened had Hilary Rodham NOT married Bill Clinton.

Given she DID marry Bill Clinton and become First Lady, my first link in the chain is to another First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. White Houses by Amy Bloom tells the story of the friendship between Eleanor and reporter, Lorena Hickok.

A book which involves an extra-marital relationship with a future occupant of the White House, namely Dwight D. Eisenhower, is Ike and Kay by James MacManus. It’s a fictionalized account of the real-life affair between Eisenhower and his wartime driver, Kay Summersby.

Back to another First Lady, this time Jacqueline Kennedy. In her latest book, The Second Marriage, Gill Paul tells the story of the relationship between Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis.

If we’re talking multiple marriages, then we need look no further than King Henry VIII of England. In the latest book in her Six Tudor Queens series, Katheryn Howard: The Tainted Queen, Alison Weir explores the tragic life of wife number five.

A character mentioned (briefly) in the book is Thomas Cromwell, the subject of Hilary Mantel’s monumental trilogy. Like the first book in the series, Wolf Hall, its successor, Bring Up The Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize. In doing so, Mantel became the first woman to win the prize twice. (Will she make it three in a row this year?)

The first author to win the prize twice, though, was J.M. Coetzee (in 1983 and again in 1999). His novel Foe, which I studied as part of my Open University English MA (you know, intertextuality and all that) is a reinvention of the story of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

This month we’ve travelled from 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue to a desert island via some matrimonial shenanigans. Where did your chain take you?

#6Degrees of Separation: From How To Do Nothing to The Illumination of Ursula Flight

whatcathyreadnext14 Comments

It’s the first Saturday of a new 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 How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. I certainly can’t have been paying attention because I confess I’d never heard of this book before it was mentioned by Kate. From the blurb, I gather it’s a critique of the forces vying for our attention in the modern world of social media. Unfortunately, I can’t say it’s likely to draw my attention away from the books I already have on my shelves waiting to be read.

Taking a rather literal approach, my first link is to The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard, a thriller with a book-within-a-book structure.

A numerical train of thought took me from ‘nothing’ to Towards Zero by Agatha Christie in which connections must be discovered between a seemingly random series of events.

Also by Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders concerns a series of murders that seem to have no connection besides the alphabetical sequence of their location. Hercule Poirot must put his “little grey cells” to work.

Back to my literal approach and The Alphabet of Heart’s Desire by Brian Keaney. It involves the meeting of three people from very disparate backgrounds, one of whom is Thomas de Quincey.

Another writer, diarist Samuel Pepys, is the main character in Entertaining Mr Pepys by Deborah Swift. Set in 1666, the book features the dazzling world of Restoration theatre.

Another book set in the 17th century and involving the theatre is The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst. The titular heroine of the book harbours an ambition to become a playwright.

So this month we’ve travelled from our always on, 24/7 world via numbers and letters to the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. Although in the 17th century, perhaps it was likely to be less the smell of the greasepaint and more the smell of the crowd… mitigated a little, perhaps, by the scent of Nell Gwynne’s oranges.

Where did your chain take you this month?

The Alphabet of Heart's DesireEntertaining Mr PepysThe Illumination of Ursula Flight