Six Degrees of Separation: From Beezus and Ramona to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

It’s May Day! Beltane, if you will. I wish I’d been clever enough to do a folk horror Six Degrees of Separation this month. Kate, who hosts the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best, has chosen a children’s classic, Beezus and Ramona, for the first book in the chain. Read on to see how I end up in a submarine with Captain Nemo.

Self Portrait in Green

Read 28/02/2021

Rating 5 stars

Written in 2005 and first published in English translation in 2014, Marie NDiaye’s hypnotic fictional memoir Self Portrait in Green follows an unnamed narrator, who is a writer, and her encounters with mysterious green women.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Turn of the Screw to The Third Policeman

It’s the first Saturday in October. That means it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation, in which Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best chooses a book and we all add six more in a chain. The concept is explained here.

Vernon Subutex 2

Read 25/11/2018-01/12/2018

Rating 4 stars

I read the first book in Virginie Despentes’s trilogy about a down-on-his-luck former record dealer earlier this autumn. I enjoyed its mercurial plot and its shallow characters enough to ask my local library to buy volume two.

The Letters of Ivor Punch

Read 10/07/2018-15/07/2018

Rating: 3 stars

Read for The Reader’s Room European Backpacking Challenge

Colin MacIntyre records and performs as Mull Historical Society. He’s one of my favourite musicians. He’s also an author. The Letters of Ivor Punch is his first novel and it won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award in 2015.

Set on an unnamed island that is easily identified as Mull, the story begins with Jake Punch visiting the sports ground where his late father broke the island’s long jump record. He’s there because his uncle Ivor Punch has died and Jake, who has been distributing letters written by his uncle, has one last letter to deliver. Except he can’t deliver it because it’s a letter to his dad and his dad was killed by Pan Am flight 103, the aeroplane brought down over Lockerbie by a Libyan terrorist.

Instead Jake reads the letter and discovers that his curmudgeonly old uncle missed his brother, Jake’s dad, in ways similar to Jake. The letter triggers memories for Jake, centred on his uncle and the letters he wrote to the great and the good.

The House of the Seven Gables

Read 07/03/2018-14/03/2018

Rating: 3 stars

I bought The House of the Seven Gables for £1 from the book shop in the café at Mrs Gaskell’s House. Once upon a time, it had cost five shillings, and its purchaser had given it to a friend. There’s an inscription inside the front cover. The recipient is nameless, the donor signs themself M.L. and it’s clear that the book meant a lot to them.

City of the Lost

Read 04/01/2018-09/01/2018

Rating: 4 stars

Strong female lead? Check.
Passes the Bechdel Test? Check.
Positive representation of People of Colour? Check.
Passes the Wallander Test*? Check

City of the Lost was one of two books chosen for me by my SantaThing Secret Santa this Xmas just gone. I hadn’t heard of Kelley Armstrong before, so I was curious to find out what her style is like.

City of the Lost is a crime thriller in the hard boiled mode. Detective Casey Duncan is a brilliant heroine. She’s sassy, determined and focused, in control of her life, but a dark incident from her past is about to catch up with her.

21st-Century Yokel

Read 28/12/2017-02/01/2018

Rating: 4 stars

I’ve been reading Tom Cox’s nature writing for a while now, first through his columns in The Guardian and more recently via his website. He’s an interesting writer. He writes about nature in a way that makes sense to me. It’s difficult to describe, but it has to do with nature being entwined into life rather than held at bay and experienced for leisure. His writing style reminds me of W G Sebald. He’s whimsical without it being a pose.

I pledged for his latest book on Unbound. I haven’t read any of his other books, despite four of them being about his life with a clowder of cats and me being the sort of person who has to stop to say hello to any cat I encounter. 21st-Century Yokel, though, seemed the kind of book about nature, folklore, understanding the place where you live, walking, landscape, myth, and sheep cuddling that I’d been waiting for.

Six Degrees of Separation – from It to The True Deceiver

 

December’s Six Degrees, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite And Best, starts with It by Stephen King.

Slade House

Read 31/10/2017-01/11/2017

Rating: 3 stars

David Mitchell’s Slade House is an adjunct to his previous six novels, an Easter egg laid on Twitter turned into a book. I enjoyed it as a quick read on Hallowe’en, surrendering myself to its suspense and tension, allowing myself to be played with, as the visitors to Slade House are played with. I indulged myself in Spot-the-Link, appreciating the way plot lines from Mitchell’s previous works made tangents with this story.