memes – Page 254 – What Cathy Read Next…

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

This 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?

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too? Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

A book for a blog tour, a book from my TBR pile and a new audiobook

The Time Machine by H G Wells (audiobook)

When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year 802,701 AD, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realises that this beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culture – now weak and childishly afraid of the dark. But they have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race descended from humanity – the sinister Morlocks.

And when the scientist’s time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels, if he is ever to return to his own era.

The Horseman (West Country Trilogy #1) by Tim Pears (ebook)

Somerset, 1911. The forces of war are building across Europe, but this pocket of England, where the rhythms of lives are dictated by the seasons and the land, remains untouched.

Albert Sercombe is a farmer on Lord Prideaux’s estate and his eldest son, Sid, is underkeeper to the head gamekeeper. His son, Leo, a talented rider, grows up alongside the master’s spirited daughter, Charlotte–a girl who shoots and rides, much to the surprise of the locals.

In beautiful, pastoral writing, The Horseman tells the story of a family, a community, and the landscape they come from.

A Quiet Death in Italy by Tom Benjamin (ebook, courtesy of Constable and Rachel’s Random Resources)

Bologna: city of secrets, suspicion . . . and murder.

When the body of a radical protestor is found floating in one of Bologna’s underground canals, it seems that most of the city is ready to blame the usual suspects: the police.

But when private investigator Daniel Leicester, son-in-law to a former chief of police, receives a call from the dead man’s lover, he follows a trail that begins in the 1970s and leads all the way to the rotten heart of the present-day political establishment.

Beneath the beauty of the city, Bologna has a dark underside, and English detective Daniel must unravel a web of secrets, deceit and corruption – before he is caught in it himself.

Recently finished

Links from the title will take you to my review or the book’s entry on Goodreads

The Offing by Benjamin Myers (audio book)

After all, there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you’re lucky.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.

The Narrow Land by Christine Dywer Hickey (hardcover, courtesy of Atlantic Books and Readers First)

1950: late summer season on Cape Cod. Michael, a ten-year-old boy, is spending the summer with Richie and his glamorous but troubled mother. Left to their own devices, the boys meet a couple living nearby – the artists Jo and Edward Hopper – and an unlikely friendship is forged.

She, volatile, passionate and often irrational, suffers bouts of obsessive sexual jealousy. He, withdrawn and unwell, depressed by his inability to work, becomes besotted by Richie’s frail and beautiful Aunt Katherine who has not long to live – an infatuation he shares with young Michael.

A novel of loneliness and regret, the legacy of World War II and the ever-changing concept of the American Dream. (Review to follow)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Englishman (Raglan #1) by David Gilman (proof copy, courtesy of Head of Zeus)

A clandestine war on the desert border of Mali and Algeria; murder and kidnap on the suburban streets of West London; a Moscow CID police inspector investigating the assassination of four of her fellow officers by the Russian mafia; a young MI6 officer facing the possibility that a long-running operation has been fatally compromised: connecting them all is the Englishman – Dan Raglan, outsider, exile, one-time member of the French Foreign Legion, fully trained killer.

Raglan’s quest for answers will become a quest for vengeance. It will lead him to the winter-ravaged wasteland of the Sverdlovskaya Oblast and Penal Colony #74, a place that holds Russia’s most brutal murderers. A place of death and retribution.

How will he get in? More importantly, how will he get out?

Tag: memes

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