6Degrees – Page 47 – What Cathy Read Next…

Here’s how it works: on the first Saturday of every month, 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 The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Find Kate’s Six Degrees of Separation here. Read on for my version. Click on the title to read the book description on Goodreads or my review, as appropriate.

Gladwell’s book is subtitled ‘How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference’ and, being a keen gardener, the little things that make a big difference in my garden are bees who pollinate so many of my fruit trees and vegetables. The Bees by Laline Paull takes the reader inside a beehive to witness its complex social structure.

Thinking of bees brought me to the product of their endeavours, honey, which happens to be the name of one of the main characters in Claire Dyer’s novel The Last Day. The book explores the dynamics of the relationship between Vita, her ex-husband, Boyd, and his new girlfriend, Honey. The idea that there is always a ‘last day’, a last chime of the clock, permeates the book.

Of course, what can follow a last day of one life is the first day of another or maybe you can have multiple first and last days. Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life, poses the question: ‘What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?’

Or perhaps you believe in the possibility of parallel lives and universes? This thought took me to Blake Crouch’s best-selling novel, Dark Matter, a mind boggling page-turner that is impossible to summarise without giving everything away.

It’s a short mind-hop from parallel lives to alternative histories and a book that is on my 20 Books of Summer Reading Challenge list, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. The book imagines a world where slavery is legal and the United States lost a war and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

Of course, for a long time in the United States, slavery was legal and a book that has this as a major element of its plot is The Floating Theatre by Martha Conway (published under the title The Underground Railway in the United States.) Young seamstress May Bedloe finds herself drawn into a world fraught with danger when she joins the famous floating theatre that plies its trade along the river separating the Confederate South and the ‘free’ North.

Next month’s starting book is: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. Time to get your thinking caps on….

Welcome to this month’s Six Degrees of Separation!

This month’s starting book is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Click on the title to read the book description on Goodreads or my review, as appropriate.

TTT_Collected Ghost Stories The mention of ‘Bible’ made me think of the title of one of M.R. James’ ghost stories, ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’ (which can be found in his Collected Ghost Stories). In the story, strange happenings are associated with eight old and, it turns out, very valuable editions of The Book of Common Prayer. When someone tries to steal the books, a ghastly revenge is meted out to them.

The Great Darkness Cover M.R. James was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge and it was in his rooms there that he first recited his ghost stories to a select audience. Therefore, I’m staying in Cambridge for my next connection, to a book set there but in 1939, in the opening weeks of the Second World War – The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly. ‘The Great Darkness’ of the title refers to the first government ordered blackout covering southern England. When daylight comes a body is discovered on the riverside and Detective Inspector Eden Brooke is ordered to investigate. Brooke’s sight was damaged in the Great War making him particularly sensitive to light therefore he joins the other ‘nighthawks’ who, through necessity or inclination, inhabit the city’s night-time streets.

light The theme of darkness brought to mind its opposite – light – and damaged sight made me think of the blind Marie-Laure in Anthony Doerr’s bestseller, All the Light We Cannot See. In the book, Marie-Laure and her father are forced to flee Paris when it is occupied by the Nazis, taking with them a highly valuable jewel.

To my mind, for just about every book there is a connection to a John Buchan book. In this case, the mention of a jewel immediately made me think of the name of the gang of evil foreign agents against which Richard Hannay pits his wits in The Thirty-Nine Steps – The Black Stone. John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps whilst on holiday with his family in Broadstairs, Kent. They had lodgings not far away from the house of a cousin of Buchan’s wife, Susan. This house had steps down to the beach – thirty-nine steps, it is reputed.

Another famous author who found Broadstairs an excellent place for writing was Charles Dickens. Dickens was a frequent summer visitor to Broadstairs in the 1850s and 1860s, staying at Fort House (now known as Bleak House), where he wrote David Copperfield. The book’s opening paragraph contains the oft-quoted line: ‘To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.‘

CatherineDickensOutsideTheMagicCircle Dickens was married to Catherine for twenty-two years and fathered ten children with her. Yet she was forced from the family home when he became enamoured of a young actress. Catherine Dickens: Outside the Magic Circle by Heera Datta is the fascinating inside story of the breakdown of the Dickens marriage told from the point of view of Catherine.

After reading this, you may never think about Charles Dickens quite the same way again.

Today we’ve travelled from the story of one family’s tragic undoing in The Poisonwood Bible to the unravelling of another in Outside the Magic Circle by way of darkness, light and a Kent seaside resort.

Next month’s starting book is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Plenty of time to get thinking and join in when #6degrees returns on 2nd June 2018.