#6Degrees of Separation: The Outsiders

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

We start with The Outsiders, which I read as a kid—my dad must have brought it home for me. I don’t remember much about it, but the main character is named Ponyboy, which is hilarious, and it’s something to do with teens in gangs.

Another book whose title follows a “The Plural-Nouns” formula is Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Interestings, which introduces us to a group of talented kids at hippie summer camp, and then tracks their lives over the next few decades.

At one point in The Interestings, a character whose employees are killed in the September 11 terrorist attack promises to pay their families the salaries that they would have earned. In Julie and Julia, Julie Powell’s decision to cook her way through Julia Child’s magnum opus is catalyzed by her misery in her job at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation—formed to distribute $10 billion in federal funds in order to rebuild areas destroyed by the attack.

Meryl Streep, of course, stars in the movie version of Julie and Julia. She also plays the Clarissa Dalloway character in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which is itself a triptych that updates Mrs. Dalloway and looks at Virginia Woolf’s own life.

The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. That year, the nonfiction prize was won by John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a book collecting his writings on American geology. McPhee is a criminally underread writer, at least in the UK and right now; he was a staff writer for the New Yorker for years and is one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers of nonfiction.

My godfather is a geologist. I have never seen him read a book, but he used to come and take me on roadtrips when I was young. We’d drive out to some backwater of rural Virginia in search of cool rocks, or just to the local plant nursery for something to put in his garden. Once he turned up unexpectedly, and I forgot to put my book down before I got in the car with him. It was Anna Karenina.

I used to reread Anna Karenina every spring, before deciding that I should just do an Annual Spring Russian Read. (Sometimes I forget.) I also have an Annual Winter Dickens, which I forget less regularly. Last year it was The Old Curiosity Shop, which I’d rank firmly in the middle tier of Dickens novels, mostly because half of it is unnecessarily manipulative padding. (Incidentally, if any of you have opinions on which Dickens book should be my next, please choose from the following options: Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edwin Drood.)

From teenage greasers to gambling granddads, via hippie nerds, lifestyle blogging, Woolfian musings, geology, and Russians: where will your 6 Degrees take you? Next month is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, which is my favourite book of all time, so hooray!

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#6Degrees of Separation: It, by Stephen King

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

We start with It, Stephen King’s creepy clown horror novel, which I read in May and (to my great surprise) thoroughly enjoyed. I had avoided King for a long time, assuming that he was probably not all that good a writer, and was completely surprised by the fact that, actually, he writes very well. (review)

Virtually the opposite happened when I read my first John Grisham novel, Camino Island; having been proved wrong with King, I had hopes that Grisham would turn out to be a pretty good writer, but these were dashed by page five. Fortunately, it’s a quick read.

My copy of Camino Island was purchased at New Dominion Bookstore in Charlottesville, where I used to work and where John Grisham would often come in to sign (he lives nearby). My current favourite author-signed copy is the paperback of White Teeth that my brother got Zadie Smith to sign and dedicate to me. (It says, “To Eleanor – the joy is in the writing!”, and it makes me teary with happiness every time I even think about it.)

Smith published her first book at twenty-four. Another young publishing phenomenon was Catherine Webb, who now writes as Claire North. I didn’t love her most recent book, The End of the Day (review), although her earlier book The Fifteen Lives of Harry August got a lot of attention and might be worth checking out.

The End of the Day is easily compared to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, but I really got whiplash from reading it so soon after finishing China Miéville’s novel Kraken. Set in London, Kraken starts with the theft of the Natural History Museum’s giant squid, and quickly delves into apocalypse cults, Londonmancers, and the unionisation of magical familiars. It’s also Gaiman-inflected, but with some tongue-in-cheek homage to Lovecraft.

A favourite magical London is the one from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. An enormous tome set during an alt-history version of the Napoleonic Wars, it focuses on the attempts of the two titular men to revive English magic. It is rich and deep and creepy and wonderful, and you’ll never look at a mirror the same way again.

Finally, another excellent alt-Napoleonic Wars novel (yes, there’s more than one of them!) is K.J. Whittaker’s recent False Lights. Whittaker’s book contains no magic, but in her world, Napoleon wins at Waterloo and installs his brother Jerome on the English throne. Our heroine is the mixed-race daughter of a black British sea captain. It’s got romance and swashbuckling and wit, and is perfect for fans of Daphne Du Maurier, Rafael Sabatini, or indeed Susanna Clarke.

From small-town American horror to sumptuous historical fancy, via blockbusting crime and literary prodigies; where will your #6Degrees take you? Next month we start with Alexander McCall Smith’s The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, a firm favourite from adolescence which is now a franchise that probably reached its natural end several years ago…

#6Degrees of Separation: Picnic at Hanging Rock

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

We start off with Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay, which I’ve never read but which was something of a sensation in the ’60s and ’70s, a novel about the disappearance of a group of Australian schoolgirls on a school outing. I gather that the central mystery is never really resolved, though apparently Lindsay wrote a revelatory final chapter which was published separately. It sounds a bit rubbish.

My favourite disappearance story this year – and one of my favourite books of the year so far, full stop – has been Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. It’s a tender, nuanced portrait of a small community where a young girl disappears while on holiday with her parents; McGregor returns to the village over the course of thirteen years, finding both change and continuity with each passing year. It is a beautiful book, and highly recommended. (review)

Another “thirteen” book is Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. In each chapter, she discusses a technical aspect of the novel form: voice, characterisation, length, and so on. In the final section, she writes notes on one hundred books that she read as part of her project to determine what defines a novel. It’s an excellent resource both on a technical level and for people who want a basic reading list of classics and contemporary classics.

One of the books I read because it was in Smiley’s compendium is Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters. A society novel about three Japanese sisters and their family’s difficulties in marrying them all off, it reminded me strongly of an east Asian Jane Austen, with equal biting wit, satire, and observation. (review – a very old one! I was so cute in 2013.)

I recommended The Makioka Sisters to a very well-read customer recently, along with Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, about a pair of Catholic priests who travel to Japan at a time when Christianity is illegal. They end up serving an underground community of believers, but at great risk both to themselves and to their flock. The book’s emotional core is the choice between renouncing one’s faith publicly in order to save the innocent, or remaining technically faithful to God but condemning others to die.

Martin Scorsese directed a nerve-wracking film of this book last year. He also directed “Hugo”, a gorgeously shot if slightly incoherent movie based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s stunning children’s novel about a boy who lives in a railway station, befriends a pioneer of early film, and tries to fix an automaton left to him by his father.

So: from Edwardian Australia to steampunk Paris, via contemporary Yorkshire, mid-century Osaka, and post-Shimabara Japan. Where will your #6Degrees take you? Next month we start with Pride and Prejudice, which ought to provide a lot of jumping-off points…

#6Degrees of Separation: Shopgirl

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

First up: Shopgirl, a novella by Steve Martin about Mirabelle, a girl who works at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and tries to navigate a love triangle. It was made into a film, which just happened to star Steve Martin as the wealthy, debonair older man.

Another monological Martin vehicle, “Roxanne”, is based on the French play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, about a charming and brilliant swashbuckler whose romantic prospects are scuppered only by the fact that he’s got an enormous, almost disfiguring, nose.

Facial disfigurement is a bit of a phobia of mine; in Tamora Pierce’s young adult novel Trickster’s Choice, the young protagonist Ally deliberately allows her nose to be broken in a fight when she’s captured as a slave, knowing that the uglier she is, the less likely it is that she’ll be bought for sex.

Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet constitute the only books I’ve read so much they’ve fallen apart, save for my copy of Little House on the Prairie, which was held together by packing tape by the time I was six.

A grown-up version of the Little House world is that conjured by Willa Cather, particularly in her gorgeous novel O Pioneers!, about a woman who inherits her immigrant family’s farm on the plains of Nebraska.

My favourite female farmer in literary history (except, perhaps, for Dick King-Smith’s Sophie) is, of course, Far From the Madding Crowd‘s Bathsheba Everdene (who doesn’t look like Carey Mulligan, jfc, this should be obvious to everyone. In my mind she actually looks a little bit like Mayim Bialik.)

So—from urban ennui to rural angst, from Beverly Hills to fictionalised Dorset via Gascony, the imaginary country of Tortall, and the Midwest! Where will your #6Degrees take you? Next month the chain starts with Picnic At Hanging Rock, which I’ve never read…

#6Degrees of Separation: The Slap

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

First up: The Slap, a book I didn’t read when it came out but which made a lot of waves. I gather the controversy derives from the book’s opening chapter, in which an adult man slaps a child who isn’t his own at a barbeque. This is something I have frequently been tempted to do (though never done), which leads us to…

Sarah Hall’s incredible novel The Electric Michelangelo, about an early twentieth-century tattoo artist and his love affair with one of his customers, a woman who asks him to cover her entire body in tattooed eyes. (I’ve been batting around the idea of a tat for years, and not yet committed. But I wanna.)

The tattoo of an eye is the distinguishing mark of the major villain, Count Olaf, in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The series also features three siblings named Violet (a gifted inventor), Klaus (a voracious reader with a photographic memory), and Sunny (who likes biting, and, eventually, cookery).

One of Snicket’s authorial gimmicks involves expanding a young reader’s vocabulary by defining tricky words within the context of the story. The only other book I’ve read with an eye to its vocabulary was Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which we read in school and for which we were required to make word lists. I learned “lugubrious”, “catarrh” and “unctuous” this way.

I’d actually encountered “unctuous” the previous summer, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out. It’s the word Rowling uses to describe Igor Karkaroff, headmaster of Durmstrang, the Eastern European magic school whose students come to participate in the Triwizard Tournament at Hogwarts.

Where do you go from Harry Potter? Everywhere, or nowhere: it’s curiously self-contained, but influences all children’s literature that comes after it. But I have one out: I met J.K. Rowling in February 2014, and at the time, I was reading This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited, by Justin Cartwright. It’s part of a commissioned series called Writers and the City, and I identified with the city’s psychic resonance in Cartwright’s life, long after he’s finished his degree and moved away.

C’est tout! Next month the chain starts with Shopgirl, by Steve Martin.

6 Degrees of Separation: Room

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

First up: Room by Emma Donoghue, the story of a young woman who is abducted, imprisoned, and impregnated. We see it all through the eyes of the son she has with her captor—Jack, who until he is five years old believes that the room where they live is all that there is.

How you feel about Room depends on large part on how authentic you feel Jack’s voice is. I liked it (many others didn’t), but another book with utterly convincing child characters is The Light Years, the first entry in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s sprawling Cazalet Chronicles, which tells the story of an extended upper-middle-class English family before and during the Second World War. It is much less sentimental Downton-esque pablum than it is an illuminating and moving look at what life used to be like, and how in many ways the emotional beats of life in the ’40s were the same ones we experience now. It’s also (The Light Years in particular) very funny.

The Light Years is a book I often recommend to people who tell me they’ve enjoyed Barbara Pym. Excellent Women is probably her most famous, centering on a group of Anglican church ladies in a small English village. Great on group politics and genteel rivalry.

Pym came back into fashion after her books spent many years under the radar. Pushkin Press tends to perform the same service for writers, often from Eastern or Central European countries, who haven’t had as much press as they should have had in the West. Stefan Zweig has perhaps not been quite as obscure as some others, but the recently republished edition of his The World of Yesterday has definitely pushed him further into the public consciousness.

Another Pushkin Press book that I reeeally want to hit the big-time is Sand (review), by Wolfgang Herrndorf. It’s basically John Le Carré as directed by the Coen Brothers in one of their blacker moods, and it’s insanely good.

Herrndorf’s book has the opposite of a false bottom: a huge twist comes far too late in the day for it to be anything other than the real ending. Emma Flint’s Little Deaths (review), while the twist is less huge, achieves the same effect with its ending, finally establishing how we’re meant to feel about a character who’s been giving off mixed signals since the beginning.

And that’s all, folks. Next month the chain will start with Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. And tonight, I’ll post my personal Baileys Prize shortlist, so stay tuned. HURRAH.

6 Degrees of Separation: Fates and Furies

This game is like “6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon” only with books. You can join in too; the rules are here.

1. This month we start with Lauren Groff’s bestselling Fates and Furies, which I have not yet read but which is the story of Lotto and Mathilde’s loving marriage. Except halfway through the perspective shifts, and we realise all is not as it seems…
2. Fates and Furies was shortlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. The winner of that award was Adam Johnson’s collection of short stories, Fortune Smiles, which focuses on (amongst other things) technology, politics, and relationships.
3. The title story of that collection is reminiscent, in its East Asian setting and flavour of surreal weirdness, of Haruki Murakami. The only novel of his that I’ve read all the way through is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,  which features dream sex, spaghetti, and a cat named after the protagonist’s brother-in-law.
4. My favourite fictional cat has got to be Behemoth, the whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking, pistol-toting kitty from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
5. I read most of The Master and Margarita in a Heathrow departure lounge on the way home for Christmas one year. Another year, in the same place, I read Hans Fallada’s bleak novel of resistance to Nazism, Alone In Berlin, which I would not recommend as airplane reading, to put it lightly. It is good—beyond good; almost essential—but extremely disturbing.

From a deceptive American marriage to the deepest questions of personal responsibility in mid-century Germany, via surrealist Japan and satirical Russia: a better geographical spread this month, though still quite Eurocentric. Does anyone have a different favourite fictional cat? I thought about Dinah, from Alice in Wonderland, or Tabitha Twitchit of Beatrix Potter, or, of course, Mrs. Norris from the Harry Potter series…