Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: 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 others on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month’s starting point is How to be Both by Ali Smith. This is a dual narrative about a young girl whose mother has recently died and an Italian Renaissance fresco painter. I found it heavy-going and gave it up forty pages in.
How to be Both was on the Man Booker shortlist in 2014. It lost to The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan – a book about the horrors of World War 2 in Asia.
Another exquisite book that deals with World War 2 in Asia is The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. This story is about the after effects of war on the people living in Malaysia.
The events in The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh occur geographically close by in Myanmar. It’s a vast historical but one portion of the book talks about Indians in the British Army fighting the Japanese.
A book with a similar title is The Glass Room by Simon Mawer. This takes us back to World War 2 in Europe with the plight of Jews in the Czech Republic. However, it is a more detached novel chronicling the story of a house (a real existing one btw).
One more World War 2 book that I enjoyed is All the Light we Cannot see by Anthony Doerr. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the life of two children – one French and one German during the World War.
The last book to end this meme is The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak – another book about children in Nazi Germany in World War 2.
This month’s Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from a dual-narrative novel, split between the twentieth and fifteenth centuries to Nazi Germany during World War 2.
Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the routes that bloggers take from a single starting point. Follow this meme on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees. Also, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
Such a neat first link there! A friend gave me a copy of The Gardens of Evening Mists having loved it. Always a little worrying in case you don’t agree but I did. I visited the building that Mawer based The Glass Room on a few years ago. English-speaking tours are booked up many months in advance because of the novel, I suspect, which is what had taken us there. We didn’t manage to go inside but were allowed to wonder around the garden and look in through the windows. It’s a lovely building
Thanks! I would hesitate recommending The Garden of Evening Mists (simply because it is a little slow and contemplative). It’s one of my personal favorites though. I would love to go and visit the Glass room building. The descriptions of it in the book are so good!