Category: Six Degrees of Separation

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with  Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain described by Amazon:

After twenty-five years of ‘sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine’, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all – and he meant all.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.

I spent more time than usual deciding which route to take with my chain. I considered starting with another book by a celebrity chef, and there are plenty to choose from, or a book with ‘kitchen’ in the title, but both chains just fizzled out.

So I opted to start with a book by an author with the same initial letters in the surname:

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, telling the story of Her Majesty, not named, but she had dogs, took her summer holiday at Balmoral and was married to a duke. She came across the travelling library outside the palace and borrowed a book to save the driver/librarian’s embarrassment. 

Also by Alan Bennett The Lady in the Van, is one of the stories that I read in his collection Four Stories. It’s also available as an e-book. In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett’s garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen is a unfinished novella in Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanderton. Told in a series of letters it’s the  story of an unscrupulous widow who plans to force her daughter into a marriage against her wishes.

Lady Susan reminded me of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, not just because both are epistolary but also the content – manipulative and evil characters without any moral scruples, who delight in their power to seduce others. One of the characters is an innocent convent girl, Cecile Volanges.

Another character called Cecile is in Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon, one of the best Maigret books I’ve read – and it is complicated, remarkably so in a novella of just 151 pages. 

Another novella in the crime fiction genre is Wycliffe and the Last Rites by W J Burley – set in Cornwall. Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe investigates a bizarre murder that shakes the village of Moresk. Arriving at church on Easter morning the vicar discovers the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps.

Well, this is my chain travelling from cooking to murder and passing through royalty, to eccentric and unscrupulous characters.

Next month (January 6, 2024), we will start with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!). Amazon describes it as A beautiful and moving novel about grief, sisterhood, squash and a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself.

1 – Saturday by Ian McEwan, which also has a squash player, a neuro surgeon. He is troubled by the impending war with Iraq, pessimistic after 9/11. On his way to his weekly squash match through London’s crowded street filled with anti-war demonstrators he gets into a quarrel with another motorist, Baxter, an aggressive young man.

2 Iraq is also the setting in Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie. It’s a Poirot mystery, but he doesn’t appear until about halfway. As the title tells you it is set in Mesopotamia, the area in the Middle East between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the area of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey).Her books set in the Middle East are based on the everyday life that she experienced on digs and on the people she met. In this one an archaeologist’s wife, Louise Leidner, the wife of the leader of the expedition, is found in her room, dead from a blow on her head, and suspicion falls on Louise’s first husband who had been sending her threatening letters, or so she had claimed.

3 The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths, the 9th Dr Ruth Galloway mystery – Ruth is a forensic archaeologist. It centres on the plight of homeless people and the maze of tunnels under Norfolk. Bones are found during the excavations when an underground restaurant in one of the tunnels is proposed. It becomes a murder mystery when two of the homeless, ‘Aftershave Eddie’ and then ‘Bilbo’ are found dead, both stabbed. Then two local women go missing and it soon becomes clear that all these events are linked.

4 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel is also set in Norfolk. It mixes the past and the present, moving seamlessly between the Eldred family’s current life (in the 1980s) in Norfolk, with their earlier life in Africa in the 1950s. The Eldreds were missionaries, first in South Africa, then in Beuchuanaland (Botswana) where a terrible and horrific event occurred and they returned to England.  However, their memories of these traumatic events refused to remain buried, eventually bringing their lives and those of their children into terrible turmoil.

5 Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

6 Another book with thirteen in the title is The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie, a collection of short stories about the Tuesday Night club, whose members include Miss Marple. They tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries.

Well, I didn’t expect where this chain was going at all beginning with the starting book, but as usually happens in my chains it includes a number of murder mysteries.

Next month (December 2, 2023), we will start with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

The starting book this month is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It’s written in such a seemingly simple style, but it captures so well the innocence and naivety of youth and hope for the future. It’s just, well, so English. I first read it as a teenager and it didn’t fail to live up to my memories of it when I reread it years later.

My first link is via castle to Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, and the fabulous Gormenghast Castle, another book I first read in my teens. The novel is poetic,  rich in imagination, description and characters. It all came alive as I reread it, and the same magic I felt the first time was still there.

My second link is via another castle – Corfe Castle, in Dorset, in The Gloriet Tower by Eileen Meyler. Another book I read as a child. It’s set in Corfe Castle a few years before the beginning of the Hundred Years War, but it is mainly fiction. As far as I remember I chose this book because of its historical setting in a castle – I loved castles (and still do).  

My third link is Corfe as it is also the setting in Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island, the first book in The Famous Five series, and possibly the first one I read as a child. Staying at Kirrin Cottage the five children visit Kirrin Island and explore the ruins of Kirrin Castle (Corfe Castle).

My fourth link is via Treasure to Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion, a sequel to Treasure Island. The children of Jim and Long John Silver return to the island. One of the crew is a certain Mr Stevenson – ‘a Scotsman and a wisp of a fellow, whose place was generally in the crow’s nest, where he acted as our lookout.’ (page 115)

My fifth link is via Stevenson, that is Robert Louis Stevenson and the first book of his I read A Child’s Garden of Verses. My Great Aunty Sally, who was my mother’s aunt, gave me this book for my birthday one year and I loved reciting the poems out loud.

My final link is via garden to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I read this several times as a child and the story has stayed with me ever since. For years my picture of the ideal garden has been a walled garden, just like the secret garden. Rereading it as an adult I realised it is full of symbolism using nature, the Bible and myths, that I never noticed as a child. 

Apart from the first one my links are all children’s fiction, which I didn’t set out to do – all my chains just grow of their own accord. I’ve read all six books.

Next month (November 4 , 2023), we’ll start with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!).

2 Sept 2023

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

The starting book this month is Wifedom by Anna Funder, a novel about George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

My first link is an obvious one via Orwell:

to George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm an allegorical novella, of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of a farm where the animals rebel against the farmer, Mr Jones, and throw him off the land. They hope to create a society where they are all equal, free and happy.

My second link is via Farming to:

James Rebank’s non fiction book, English Pastoral, about farming. His family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. It is beautifully written. I enjoyed his account of his childhood and his nostalgia at looking back at how his grandfather farmed the land. And I was enlightened about current farming practices and the effects they have on the land, depleting the soil of nutrients.

My next link is via English to:

The English by Jeremy Paxman, more non fiction He writes about food, sport, football hooligans, language, individualism, education, religion, ‘John Bull’, cities and the countryside – the English idyllic village, class structure and social tone, attitudes to women, business and trade to name but a few topics. It’s well researched and very readable, with a bibliography listing all the books he mentions plus others that presumably he has used.

My next link is via Jeremy to

Another author called Jeremy, Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs: the Left Bank World of Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer. A memoir of the author’s refuge at the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. on the banks of the River Seine opposite Notre Dame. Jeremy Mercer, a Canadian crime reporter, packed his bags and headed for Paris after receiving a death threat. He arrived during the last days of 1999 and shortly afterwards found his way to Shakespeare & Co, where he was amazed to find not only is it a bookshop but also a place providing beds for a number of writers. 

My fifth link is via Shakespeare to:

Shakespeare’s Restless World by Neil MacGregor, non fiction recreating Shakespeare’s world through examining twenty objects. It reveals so much about the people who lived then, who went to see Shakespeare’s plays in the 1590s and 1600s, and about their ideas and living conditions.

My final link is via a retelling of one of Shakespeare’s plays:

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It sticks well to Shakespeare’s version (which itself wasn’t original!) – it has the same themes and plot lines. Inspector Macbeth, an ex-drug addict is the head of the SWAT team. All the characters are here, including Duncan, the new police Chief Commissioner, Malcolm his deputy, Banquo, Macbeth’s friend and his son, Fleance, Inspector Duff (Shakespeare’s Macduff, Thane of Fife), head of the Narcotics Unit, Caithness, the three witches, Lennox and so on. 

My chain is mainly non fiction. I’ve read all six books.

Next month (October 7, 2023), we’ll start with a classic – I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

The starting book this month is Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield a book I haven’t read. Amazon describes it thus: A TV script writer thinks she’s over romance, until an unlikely love interest upends all her assumptions: a humorous, subversive and tender-hearted novel from the bestselling author of Rodham, American Wife and Prep.

I don’t often read romantic comedy, or romance novels so I couldn’t immediately think of where to start my chain. And then I remembered that in 2006, before I began my blog, I enjoyed reading The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. It’s a romantic comedy about Samantha who leaves her job as a high-powered London lawyer and, mistaken for another woman, she finds herself employed as a housekeeper without a clue how to cook or keep house.

One of the characters in The Undomestic Goddess is Nathaniel, a hunky gardener, so my second link is to another gardener in Mr MacGregor by Alan Titchmarsh, another romantic comedy. It’s about Rob MacGregor, who is hired to recapture the declining audience for a daytime gardening programme, and quickly becomes Britain’s latest heartthrob. It’s not as funny as The Undomestic Goddess.

Moving away from romantic comedy my third link is to Deadheads (my review) by Reginald Hill in which a rose garden is the setting for a murder. Life is on the up for Patrick Aldermann: his Great Aunt Florence has collapsed into her rose bed leaving him Rosemont House with its splendid gardens. Or was she murdered?

Using ‘rose’ as my fourth link takes the chain to The Sunne in Splendour (my review) by Sharon Penman historical fiction based on the War of the Roses, the conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England. It tells the story of Richard III from his childhood to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. 

My fifth link is to another book about Richard III – Alison Weir’s non-fiction about The Princes in the Tower, which examined the available evidence. She concluded that Richard III was responsible for the deaths of his nephews, the young Princes.

Much has been written about Richard, from the time of his death onwards and he remains a controversial figure. My final link is to Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time, which also investigates Richard’s role in the death of his nephews and his own death at the Battle of Bosworth and concluded that Richard hadn’t murdered his nephews.

My chain includes romantic comedy, crime and historical fiction and non fiction. I’ve read all six books.

Next month (2 September 2023), we’ll start with Wifedom by by Anna Funder.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we begin with Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, the winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, in which an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But soon the past begins to invade the present.This is not a book I’ve read but I think I might like it.

I’m beginning my chain with David Shenk’s The Forgetting: understanding Alzheimer’s: the biography of a disease. This is a remarkable book about the wasting away of the mind, inside a still vigorous body. Shenk’s history of Alzheimer’s is both poignant and scientific, grounded by the fundamental belief that memory forms the basis of our selves, our souls, and the meaning in our lives.

Another book about memory, but about remembering not forgetting, is my second link – Footfalls in the Memory by Terry Waite. Waite was the Assistant for Anglican Communion Affairs for the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, in the 1980s. As an envoy for the Church of England, he travelled to Lebanon to try to secure the release of four hostages, including the journalist John McCarthy. He was himself kidnapped and held captive from 1987 to 1991. [Wikipedia] During his captivity he wrote his autobiography in his head, and also attempted to remember the books, poems and prayers he had read during his life.

My third link is one of the books Waite described – Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers. Lord Peter Wimsey and his bride, Harriet Vane are on their honeymoon. They are staying in a remote country house when they find the previous owner’s body in the cellar. It’s Dorothy L. Sayers’ last full-length detective novel. Variously described as a love story with detective interruptions and a detective story with romantic interruptions, it lives up to both descriptions with style.

‘Honeymoon’ is the link to my fourth link as Peter Pascoe is away on his honeymoon in An April Shroud by Reginald Hill, whilst Dalziel is on holiday. He meets the Fielding family on their way back home after Conrad Fielding’s funeral. Although the police had decided that Conrad’s death had been an accident, Dalziel cannot help but ferret out what really happened to him.

‘April’ is the link for my fifth link in my chain because I read Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel in April 2008. It’s a remarkable memoir that came across to me as being clear, honest and very moving. She’s not looking for sympathy but has written this memoir to take charge of her memories, her childhood and childlessness, feeling that it is necessary to write herself into being. As a child she believed their house was haunted and she was often very frightened. Home was a place where secrets were kept and opinions were not voiced. Her experience of ghosts at the age of 7 was horrifying as she felt as though something came inside her, ‘some formless, borderless evil’. She saw the children she never had as ghosts within her life; ghost children who never age, who never leave home. 

My final link is to a novel featuring a ghost – The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson. It is Icelandic noir, a mix of horror and psychological thriller. When Una arrived in Skálar, she had the feeling that it was like being a folk tale, an ominous supernatural tale set in a vague shifting world where nothing was solid or real, almost like a ghost town. The feeling grows stronger when she sees a little girl with long, pale hair in the window of Salka’s house – but Salka tells her that Edda was in bed. Later she discovers that the ghost of a young girl who had died fifty years earlier was said to haunt the house.

My chain begins and ends with books translated into English. In between are non fiction books about memory and crime fiction novels.

Next month (August 5, 2023), we’ll start with Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld.