And so we come to December and the last Six Degrees of Separation for the year. For newbies to blogging – because the rest of you surely know by now – this is a meme currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). For information about how the meme works, please click the link on her blog-name. It’s fascinating to see the wild and wonderful paths different bloggers go, all starting with the same book – which, this month is a book I haven’t read (as is more common than not), Stephen King’s It. As always though, I have read all the books I link to.

The reason I haven’t read It is that I’m not a big fan of horror, either to read or see in movies, and It is, I understand, horror. I have enjoyed some movie adaptations of King’s novellas, like The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by me, and Apt pupil, but the horror stories? Not so much. So, how to link a book that I have not only not read but is a genre I don’t like? Well, I’ve chosen something superficial …

One-word-titles! How original, eh?! There are many possibilities here, but I’m going to choose one I read this year, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (my review). It’s one of those books that some people love and some hate, mostly because of its narrator. Some people just don’t like a foetus as a narrator! Can’t understand it myself. After all, fiction is supposed to be about the imagination. Seriously, though, I do understand the uncertainty about such a device, but I thought McEwan pulled it off …

As did too, I felt, Courtney Collins with her dead baby narrator in The burial (my review). If you think a foetus is a little bizarre, a dead baby speaking from the grave may be a step too far for you, but again, I thought Collins carried it off to present a fascinating historical fiction work about an Australian female bushranger. I haven’t heard anything more about Collins since, but I do hope she’s working on another book.

Anyhow, my next link is the obvious one. It’s on the word “burial” in the title and is, of course, Hannah Kent’s Burial rites (my review) Not only does it have “burial” in the title, but it is also a work of historical fiction, albeit one set in remote 19th century Iceland, not early 20th century outback Australia. Kent’s book, however, was not the first book set in Iceland that I’ve read. That honour goes to my next linked book …

Halldór Laxness’ spare, mesmerising Independent people. Unfortunately, I read this book a few years before I started blogging, so I don’t have a review to link to. One day I might fish out my reading notes and try to concoct a review, just to have it recorded on my blog. But, I probably won’t – because I fear the result would be too superficial. I really need to have a book fresh in my mind to write my reviews.

Now, the thing about Laxness, besides being Icelandic, is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1955. He is, apparently, Iceland’s only Nobel Laureate. Aussies may see where this is going – it’s to Patrick White, who is not quite our only Nobel Laureate, but he is our only Nobel Laureate in Literature. The Nobel Prize goes, as you know, to a body of work, so I’m doing the logical thing and have chosen the novel that got him going, his debut novel, Happy Valley (my review).

I’m going to stick with this idea of debut novel for my last link – and choose another older debut novel, Louise Mack’s The world is round (my review). While White’s book was first published in 1939, the year he turned 27, Mack’s book was published in 1896 when she was 26. Mack may not have gone on to have the stellar literary career that White did, but she’s part of our early literary tradition and I don’t want her forgotten!

So, this month we’ve travelled the globe a bit, from America to England to Australia to Iceland and back to Australia! We’ve visited remote cold places and remote hot places. And we’ve met some unusual narrators. I’ve had fun – and I hope you have too.

And now, to end, have you read It? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

Last month I changed my Six Degrees titling practice to not including the end book. Most commenters preferred that approach, so I’m sticking with it for the moment, with apologies to those who demurred! And now, before I get stuck into this month’s choices, the formalities. Six Degrees of Separation is a meme currently run by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). For information about how the meme works, please click the link on her blog-name. It’s a fun meme.

This month’s book, as often happens, is one I haven’t read, Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than zero. It’s set in 1980s Los Angeles, and the GoodReads summary calls it “a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money– a place devoid of feeling or hope.”  Plenty there for connections, but that’s not the way I’m going to go. However, before we set off, I’ll reiterate that, as always, I’ve read all the books in my chain, though some before I started this blog.

So, the obvious link for this book would be to go with a title with a number in it – and that’s what I’ve decided to do, except I decided to challenge myself further and find six books I’ve read that have numbers in the title, starting with one, then two and on through to six. And I did it. First cab off the rank is Jessica Anderson’s ONE of the wattle birds (my review). Anderson was a well-regarded Australian author whose best-known book is the Miles Franklin Award winning Tirra Lirra by the river. One of the wattle birds was her last novel.

For two, I have Irma Gold’s short story collection TWO steps forward (my review). I loved the title of this because it suggests that phrase “two steps forward, one step back” which is pretty much how life often goes, isn’t it? The thing about short story collections is that it’s often hard to remember the stories years down the track, but in this collection there’s one in particular that has always stuck in my mind, “Refuge” about an empathetic woman working in a refugee detention centre. She cares deeply for the detainees but she’s powerless to change anything. It’s a story that’s still (if not more) relevant today – but then all the stories are, because they are about ordinary people and the things that happen to them, such as divorce, terminal illness, miscarriage, homelessness.

The next book is also still relevant today, though it’s nearly twenty years old. It’s one, though, that I haven’t forgotten. I’m talking THREE dollars by Elliott Perlman, which has also been adapted to film. It’s an excruciating book about when bad things happen to good people, about what happens when you stand up for what you think is right. You can end up with nothing but three dollars, that’s what. Elliott Perlman is not a prolific writer, but when he writes it’s usually powerful.

Now, number four is the odd one of the group because although I’ve read it – my reading database says so – my memories of it are vague. I read it when I was actively involved in a few online bookgroups. The book is The rule of FOUR by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. You know how GoodReads displays the ratings/reviews by your “friends” at the top of the list of reviews for a book? Well, for this book they were all from some of my internet bookgroup pals. Their ratings are 4, 2, 2, 1 and 1. This probably tells you why I don’t remember much about it.

It’s a different story for number five, however. The book is Nocturnes: FIVE stories about music and nightfall (my review) by this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Kazuo Ishiguro. I’m a big Ishiguro fan, having read all but two of his books, and I enjoyed this collection. It’s identifiably Ishiguro, not only because it deals with subjects he likes, such as music, but also for the style. The stories all have narrators who are either unreliable or in some other way not completely across what is going on, and they have an overall tone “of things not being quite right, of potential not being quite achieved, of people still looking for an elusive something but not necessarily knowing quite what that is.”

And so we come to the end, and it is, surprisingly, another short story collection, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Stella Prize shortlisted SIX bedrooms (my review). However, unlike Nocturnes, the “six” doesn’t relate to the number of stories in the book, but to the title story about a six-bedroom share house.

And I’ll leave it there. This has been an odd one to write up. I’m not sure that I like the way I decided to go. It was fun searching for books to meet my sequential numbers challenge, but it’s more fun looking for ideas to link on. Back to normal next month!

Meanwhile, have you read Less than zero? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

I’ve decided to change my blog titling practice for my Six Degrees meme, from including the end book to not! I’ve decided it’s more fun to read the post following the connections until the end, rather than knowing the end book at the beginning? Let me know what you think. But now, the formalities. Six Degrees of Separation is a meme currently run by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). To find out more about it please click the link on her blog-name. It’s a fun meme.

Now, the book Kate chose for October is one I’ve actually read, unlike many of her other choices, but it was long before I started blogging. It’s Laura Esquivel’s Like water for chocolate. Unfortunately, I no longer have my beautiful hardback copy, having lent it to someone and never got it back, as happens sometimes in our reading lives. As always, I’ve read all the books in my chain, though not all since I started this blog.

I had fun choosing my first book. Should I go with chocolate in the title (like Chocolat), or Mexican authors (like Valeria Luiselli), or magic realism (like Gabriel Garcia Marquez), all of which or whom I’ve read? Nope! The subtitle of Esquivel’s book is “a novel in monthly installments (sic) with recipes, romance and home remedies”, so I’ve chosen another book that (like Chocolat in fact) also glorifies food and eating, Fannie Flagg’s Fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I read it before blogging, so no review to link to I’m afraid.

Food plays a shocking role at the end of Flagg’s warm Deep-South-set comedy, but I’ve decided not to go there. Instead, I’m linking on the cafe idea, and have chosen another book that I read before blogging, Marion Halligan’s The point, about a beautiful, top-class, but fictional, glass restaurant in my city, the capital of Australia. I did say I wasn’t going to follow Flagg’s shocking end, but I need to admit that there’s a murder in this book so it’s not all champagne and caviar! It deals with haves and have-nots, with insiders and outsiders (for which the glass motif works well, of course.)

And now, I’m going to get to books I’ve read since blogging. Another book which deals with insiders and outsiders is Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review). Its narrator is an outsider who is welcomed into a Victorian artists’ community as the friend of the founding artists’ children. She has her life, her expectations, her dreams turned around, until things go awry. How much it was all to her benefit is a question we ponder at the end, and that is also a relevant question for my next book …

William Lane’s The salamanders (my review) which has its origins in an artists’ colony though the book is set sometime after that colony had disbanded. However, it too explores the impact on the children of the artists. It’s a very different book to Bitto’s, however, delving into bigger issues relating to the land. Salamanders, and lizards in general, feature, both to represent the antiquity of the Australian continent and also, I think, resilience.

Regardless of the intent, this motif reminded me of the bar, cheekily called the Legless Lizard, in Thea Astley’s Drylands (my review)! It’s set in the dying town of Drylands and presents a bleak picture of Australia. Here is the quote I used in my review, describing Drylands as

a God-forgotten tree-stump of a town halfway to nowhere whose population (two hundred and seventy-four) was tucked for leisure either in the bar of the Legless Lizard or in front of television screens, videos, Internet adult movies or PlayStation games for the kiddies.

[…]

No one was reading anymore.

Drylands could be called dystopian, albeit one set in the present not the future. And that made me think of Jane Rawson’s A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (my review). There’s no doubt about its definition as a dystopian novel, dealing as it does with the devastating effects of climate change. Coincidentally, it also has several scenes in a bar!

Well, we haven’t travelled far once leaving the Americas – besides returning there briefly in Rawson’s book – but we have spent quite a bit of time in kitchens and bars. What does that tell you about me?

Have you read Like water for chocolate? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

As you are sure to know by now, I am becoming rather addicted to the Six Degrees of Separation meme currently run by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Please click on the link if you want to find out more about this meme, because I’m moving on with my selections! Our starting book this month is Jung Chang’s three generation biography-autobiography, Wild swans. This book is on my TBR. I missed it when my reading group did it, because I was living in the USA at the time, and I always meant to rectify that …

Now, I could link to a book my reading group did while I was away that I did read, but instead I’m going to choose a book that I read instead of books they were reading (even though, unfortunately, it was way before blogging so I have no review to link to). I’m choosing it because it was such an eye-opener for me, and I love to recommend it whenever I get the chance – and, it is set in Asia, albeit Japan, not China. The book is Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka sisters, and is set in Osaka between the mid 1930s and 1941. It’s about a wealthy Osaka-based family and its attempts to marry off the third sister.

This is the book that introduced me in a big way to Japanese literature, a major contemporary exponent of which is Haruki Murakami. I’ve read a few of his books, but not many since I started blogging. One, though, that I have reviewed is his collection of short stories, Blind willow, sleeping women (my review). If you’ve never read Murakami, these short stories – 24 of them in fact – would provide an excellent introduction to his somewhat strange but fascinating world view.

My next link is to another collection of short stories, but to make the link a bit meaningful, I’m choosing a collection by a Japanese-born English writer – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five stories of music and nightfall (my review). These five stories touch the theme of music in some way. They also feature a typical Ishiguro device, the unreliable narrator (or at least a narrator who is not completely across what is going on in the story s/he is telling.

Now, many writers, talk about being inspired by music, but the one I’m going to link to here is our wonderful late poet Dorothy Porter, and her little book On passion (my review). Porter dates her passion for music back to her introduction to the Beatles in 1964. She writes that she has written “virtually all [her] poems to rock riffs and rhythm – the catchier, the darker, the louder, the gutsier the better.”

Porter died too young, from breast cancer at the age of 54. We Aussies have lost a few of our favourite women writers, too young, in recent years. Another is Gillian Mears, who suffered from multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades before dying last year at the age of 51. I have reviewed her Foals bread here. It’s a novel about a passion in fact, the passion for the sport of horse high jumping. I loved the way Mears conveyed that passion through her characters Noah and Roley.

And now for my final link, I’m going to return to my reading group. Gillian Mears was one of several Australian women writers we discovered in the year of our formation, 1988. Many of them, though not Mears, we found in the anthology, Room to move, which was our first book. It had stories by Glenda Adams, Thea Astley, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Elizabeth Jolley, and many others, including Carmel Bird. It is her latest novel, Family skeleton (my review) that I’m going to use for my last link. Family skeleton seems the perfect book to end a chain that started with a book about three generations of women. I’m sure Chang dealt with a skeleton or two!

So there you have it … we started with one sort of family in China, then visited Japan and England, before coming to Australia and ending with a different sort of family.

Have you read Wild swans? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

Woo hoo, it’s Six Degrees of Separation day again, and for this month our host Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest) has selected a special book, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is 50 years old this year. This meme, as you probably know by now, requires we players to create a chain of six more books, linking one from the other on whatever basis, flimsy or otherwise, we can justify. I have read Picnic, albeit nearly 40 years ago, and of course as always, I have read all the books I select for my chain.

But, here’s where the problem started. I could think of so many ways to link from this book that I was stalled for a while. Would I link to another novel that readers thought was a real story, or a novel starting with a picnic, or a novel adapted to a popular movie, or, perhaps to another Gothic novel about mysterious disappearances. I decided on the last, and so my first link is to Sarah Kanake’s Sing fox to me (my review). Set in Tasmania, which is a favourite location for Australian Gothic novels, Kanake’s book is about a young 14-year-old girl, River Snow Fox, who disappears into the bush on a rainy night.

From here, given the prevalence of the lost child motif in Australian literature, I couldn’t not go to another book about lost young girls in the bush, Louis Nowra’s Into that forest (my review). Also set in Tasmania, it’s about two young girls, Hannah and Becky, who find themselves lost in the bush after their boat capsizes in a storm and Hannah’s parents drown. They are taken in by a Tasmanian Tiger pair, and live with them for four years until they are found – by Becky’s father. And then comes the problem, how to reintegrate into human society.

And now, if you know recent Aussie literature, you might guess my next link. Yes, Eva Hornung’s Dog boy (my review). It too is about a feral or wild child, this time a young 4-year-old boy who is taken in by a dog pack. In it, too, like Nowra’s, the boy returns to human society and again, reintegration proves a serious challenge. However, Hornung’s book explores the issue from a different, more scientific angle, and, although she is an Australian author, the book is set in Moscow. This gives me the opportunity to change my linking pattern from lost children to …

Setting, sort of. I have reviewed other books set in Russia, but we’re now going to Russia’s neighbour, Ukraine, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated (my review). Coincidentally, it also involves the search for a lost person, though in this case it’s the protagonist’s search for the woman who, he believes, saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War 2. It’s a Holocaust novel, but it is also a rather wild, postmodern novel that plays within itself and with the reader. None of these factors, though, generate my next link. Instead I’m going whimsical, and am linking to …

Another three-name author. I was surprised when I thought of going this way, just how many such-named authors I’ve read, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tara June Winch, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Tegan Bennett Daylight. I love these names, they have such a wonderful ring when you say them. Anyhow, of these, I’m choosing Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection of short stories, Six bedrooms (my review). This is not one of those linked collections, but most do share a theme, coming-of-age.

And now, I bet you thought I was going to link on the coming-of-age theme, didn’t you? But, I’m not. In 2016, Bennett’s book was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. It was a very interesting list, as its six books included two short story collections and an essay collection. For my final link, because I loved it so much, I’m choosing the other short story collection, Elizabeth Harrower’s A few days in the country, and other stories (my review). If you like short stories and you haven’t read it, then you have a thrill in store (is all I can say).

So, there you have it for another month. I’ve managed to include two male authors, and one non-Australian. We spent a lot of time in the bush with lost children, then ventured to the Ukraine and into bedrooms and other domestic spaces, before, guess what, somehow returning to the country (albeit not to lost children.)

Have you read Picnic at Hanging Rock? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

Here we are again at the first Saturday of the month – and you know what that means don’t you! Yep, the Six Degrees of Separation meme. As most of you know, it’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). This means she has the power – though she will take requests – to nominate the book from which we create a chain of six more books, linking one from the other on whatever basis we can justify. After the excitement of having a book last month that I’d read, this month is back to situation normal – one I haven’t! It’s Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. As always, I have read all the books I select for my chain.

The obvious link would be Madeleine St John’s Women in black as it’s all about shopgirls, but I used it recently so have come up with a more fun link! The first thing I thought when I saw this month’s choice was that we currently seem to have many authors named Steve or Stephen in Australia. There’s Steven Carroll, the New-Zealand-born-but-now-Australian-resident Stephen Daisley, Stephen Orr, and Steve Toltz. I’m choosing Steve Toltz since he’s known as Steve (like Steve Martin) and because I’ve reviewed his book, A fraction of the whole. I think that’s a good enough reason.

Another interesting thing about Toltz’s A fraction of the whole, besides the fact that I enjoyed it, is that it won the inaugural NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award in 2009. Two years later, in 2011, Alex Miller won it with his beautiful novel Lovesong (my review). So, my first link was on first names, and my second one is on an award won by both books, but my next is on style, specifically narrative technique.

Lovesong is a metafictional work about a novelist writing the story of other characters in the book. I enjoy novels which play with the idea of fiction, which remind us that we are reading fiction not reality, which draw attention to the art of storytelling. As Miller’s novelist Ken says, “I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it.” Another metafictional novel teasing us about the art of storytelling is Debra Adelaide’s The women’s pages (my review). Here is Adelaide’s novelist-character, Dove:

What, Dove wondered, had she done? Or had she done it? Maybe it had happened exactly like this and she was merely recording the facts.

My next link – Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s tricksy Faces in the crowd (my review) – continues the metafictional theme. In this novel we see our writer-character trying to make something interesting out of her life, and her husband, looking over her shoulders, is not very happy:

Why have you banished me from the novel? What? You wrote that I’d gone to Philadelphia. Why? So something happens.

But this is just one of the layers in this complex little (but big) novella.

I’ve probably done the metafiction thing enough for this round, so let’s move on to something else – translated fiction. I don’t read as much translated fiction as I’d like, but I have read some and am going to link to another translated work by another Latin American writer, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The feast of the goat (my review) If Luiselli is about exploring the meaning of, value of, boundaries of, fiction, Vargas Llosa is all about using fiction to tell a very serious story set during the end of Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

My final book is another translated work but that’s not the reason I’ve chosen to link it. My reason is that it’s another story which explores a political event, in this case Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The book is António Lobo Antunes’ The natural order of things (my review). This one, however, is less overtly political than Vargas Llosa’s book, being about how people cope when the world around them is anything but “natural”.

Last month I said that next time we’d need to travel more widely than just England and Australia – and we sure have. This is also my first #6degrees meme which has more male writers than female, and an equal number of non-Australian books to Australian. What’s come over me!

Have you read Shopgirl? And whether or not you have, what would you link to? 

Another month, another Six Degrees of Separation meme. My how quickly the months are passing! The meme is, as most of you know by now, currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month she nominates a book from which we try to create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other on whatever excuse, flimsy or otherwise that we can come up with. And, guess what, this month I have actually read the nominated book, Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap (my review). As always, I have read all the books I select for my chain.

Tsiolkas’ The slap is about an extended family, of migrant background, and friends, living in suburban Melbourne. Its author, Tsiolkas, is Australian-born of Greek immigrant parents. This reminded me of Hanif Kureishi’s The buddha of suburbia (my review) to which I admit I’ve linked in this meme before. Kureishi is English-born of a Pakistani father and English mother, and his book is about the life of a multicultural family in a London suburbs. More satirical than Tsiolkas’ The slap, and more closely focused on the challenges of race and ethnicity, but both reflect the experience of immigrant generations in the ‘burbs.

Linking now on content more than author similarity, The buddha of suburbia’s exploration of multiculturalism took me back to Australia and Madeleine St John’s The women in black (my review). It is set in the ladies fashion section of a classy department store in the 1950s, a time when the post-war influx of European refugees saw Australian society challenged by new foods not to mention new values and attitudes to life and family.

My next link draws on multiple aspects – content, location and period. I’m talking Mena Calthorpe’s The dyehouse (my review) which is also set in 1950s Sydney, and which, like The women in black, deals with the lives of workers in one business. However, Mena Calthorpe’s intention is more strongly focused on labour conditions. Her business is the textile industry, a dyehouse, and she exposes how workers are poorly cared for, poorly paid, and have little power to do anything about it. Towards the end of the novel, though, there are intimations of the workers starting to organise.

Wendy Scarfe’s Hunger town (my review) is set a little earlier, from the mid 1920s to late 1934, in Adelaide’s port district. It tells of the struggles of wharf labourers to survive as unemployment and hunger took hold. It explores the ensuing political unrest and the growing attraction of leftist political ideologies like communism and anarchism, alongside unionism, in such a volatile environment. It is also, like the books by St John and Calthorpe, historical fiction.

And so, my next link is on form (genre) rather than content. I’m going to change country and era, and pop over to early 19th century England in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures (my review). You’ll realise soon why I’ve chosen this particular piece of historical fiction, but first a little about its content. It tells the story of two women who were fossil hunters in Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century: Mary Anning (1799-1847), a poor working class woman whose fossil finds helped change the course of paleontology, and Elizabeth Philpot (1780-1857), a gentlewoman who befriended Anning and who was particularly interested in fossil fish.

And now, for the first time since I started doing this meme, I get to link to one of my very favourite authors, Jane Austen (1775-1817). I could link to any of her books because they are all set in early 19th century England, and I’d love to link to one I’ve reviewed here. However, I’m choosing one that I haven’t posted on yet, Persuasion, though I expect to write on it later this year. If you know your Austen, you’ll know why I’ve chosen this one: she set a critical scene in Lyme Regis for that novel. In fact, the Lyme Regis connection is the main reason I read Remarkable creatures.

And so, I started with an unruly, messy family in The slap and ended with another one, albeit of a different sort, in Persuasion. In between we went to England, back to Australia, before returning to England again. We must travel elsewhere next month!

Have you read The slap? And whether or not you have, what would you link to?