Tag: 6Degrees

Here’s how Six Degrees of Separation 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 to the Mister Linky on Kate’s post. You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6degrees

This month’s starting book is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Click on the title of the books in my chain to read the book description on Goodreads or my review, as appropriate.

Memoirs of a Geisha tells the story of a young peasant girl sold as servant and apprentice to a geisha house, revealing Japan’s history from 1929 to the post-war years.

Thinking of other memoirs led me to The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which contains the story ‘Silver Blaze’.  This particular story includes a famous exchange between Holmes and Inspector Gregory, who asks:

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

A fairly obvious next move is to Mark Haddon’s award winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in which fifteen year-old Christopher Boone, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, turns detective in order to solve the mystery of a neighbour’s murdered dog.

Amongst other things, Christopher hates the colours yellow so I hope he will beg my pardon if my next link in the chain is to Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Set in Nigera, it tells the stories of Ugwu, Olanna and Richard who are thrown together by the horrific Biafran War.

This leads me to another book set in Nigeria – Wake Me When I’m Gone by Odafe Atogun. It’s the story of Ese, a widow, who rejects the demand of the Chief of her village that she marry again, bringing unwelcome consequences.  Ese’s village is a community influenced by superstition, fearful of the wrath of their gods in case they send bad weather or other natural disaster and who believe that defiance of the gods will bring madness and death.

Set in 1348 at the time of the Black Death, the inhabitants of the village at the heart of The Last Hours by Minette Walters also believe the pestilence has been sent as a punishment by God.   The Lady of the Manor decides to quarantine the entire village within the moated boundary of the manor house, hoping to keep the plague out.

The passengers and crew in White Water, Black Death by Shaun Ebelthite are in the opposite position when an Ebola outbreak strikes the cruise ship and they are trapped aboard.

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For this month’s Six Degrees of Separation we’ve travelled from early 20th century Japan to 19^th century Dartmoor, to modern day Swindon in Wiltshire, to Nigeria, to medieval Dorset and ended on the high seas.

Next month’s starting book: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

 

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 Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. Click on the book titles to read the description on Goodreads or my review, as appropriate.

 

Wolf’s ‘beauty myth’ is the obsession she sees with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in ‘an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfil society’s impossible definition of “the flawless beauty”’.  I can’t think of any occupation that defined women more by their appearance than a Las Vegas showgirl, which is the subject of Elizabeth J. Church’s historical novel, All the Beautiful Girls.  In the book, Lily escapes a traumatic upbringing with a dream of finding fame as a dancer in Las Vegas but ends up instead as a showgirl, prized for her beauty and voluptuous figure.

Lily makes her escape from her hometown in Kansas which naturally made me think of another Kansas resident, Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.  Unlike Lily, however, Dorothy concludes ‘there’s no place like home’. It may not be home to the Emerald City or be inhabited by munchkins but Australia is often referred to as ‘Oz’.  Lachlan Walter’s novel, The Rain Never Came, immerses the reader in the post-apocalyptic setting of a drought-stricken Australia.

Too much rain is one of the disasters that beset Wang Lung and his family in The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, forcing them to flee to the city in search of food and employment.  However, Wang Lung’s belief that ownership of land is the key to the survival and prosperity of his family never leaves him.  There is a similar theme in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, whose heroine, Chris Guthrie, the daughter of a tenant farmer in the fictional estate of Kinraddie in the north-east of Scotland, struggles between her love of the land and her desire to escape the harshness of farming life and seek an education. A notable feature of the landscape in which the book is set is The Standing Stones.

This led me to The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements.  In the book, set in 17^th century Yorkshire, a stone circle known as the White Ladies, where macabre happenings are said to have occurred, casts an eerie presence over the inhabitants of Scarcross Hall.

So, commencing with Wolf’s seminal feminist work of literature, we’ve travelled to Las Vegas, Australia, rural China, Scotland and Yorkshire by way of The Land of Oz.

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Next month’s starting book is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden