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!