Showing posts with label 6 degrees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 6 degrees. Show all posts

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Six Degrees of Separation - June, 2018

June's starting point is Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.  The subtitle is "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference."  










That made me think of some of my favorite "little" books, including Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women.  A story of four sisters, and yes, fiercely independent Jo was my favorite, too.  









The sisters in Little Women manage to maintain the bonds of sisterly affection (as I imagine they would put it).  Not so the sisters in Ian McEwan's Atonement.  This one has it all: misunderstandings, class differences, betrayal, guilt, war, and a love-it-or-hate-it ending.  It was made into a film (with a fabulous cast) in 2007. 



 

One of the stars of that film, Saoirse Ronan, was also in the film adaptation of Colm Toibin's novel, Brooklyn, a story about the personal growth of a young Irish immigrant to New York.  







A very different New York experience can be found in the non-fiction Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman.  It is the story of a 104 year old reclusive heiress, a great fortune, and the mystery of her life.  



An American heiress of a rather different type is the subject of Jeffrey Tobin's American Heiress:  The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes, and Trial of Patty Hearst.  The subtitle says it all;  it was a series of strange events during a strange time in American history. 






 
The original Hearst fortune was a product of the American west  (so was the Clark fortune).  But the vast majority of those who went west hoping to find their own fortune were not so lucky.  One of those was the Ingalls family, well-known from Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books.  But those books, while based on her story, were fictionalized.  For a more thorough picture of Laura's life and work and that of her daughter, Rose, who was more famous than her mother for a time, Caroline Fraser's excellent Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is the book to read.  


From little things to little houses....there is this month's six degrees.  Thanks to Books are my Favourite and Best for the six degrees meme.  I'm looking forward to reading everyone else's chains!



 

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Six Degrees of Separation - April 2018

This month we're starting with Arthur Golden's 1997 bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha.  I read this novel many years ago as part of an "Around the World" book challenge: read a book set in or about a country in each of six continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Australia/Oceania. The few books set in Antarctica tend to be about polar exploration or natural history, and there aren't a lot to choose from, so the challenge allowed us to either pick one of them or read a second book about a continent we particularly wanted to "explore."  For the Asia part of the challenge, I picked Memoirs of a Geisha since I think half the people I knew had read it and recommended it.  I enjoyed it, but I can't say that much of it stayed with me. Some of the other books that I read for that challenge have.

 
 
For Europe, I read The Siege, by Helen Dunmore.   Set in what was then Leningrad in the Soviet Union during the first winter of the city's besiegement by the Germans during World War II, this is a beautifully written story of physical and emotional survival and endurance.  It is sometimes harrowing, but the writing flawless, and the theme is lightened by the love and beauty the characters find, even in such circumstances. 

 
 


Another difficult but rewarding read was my choice for Africa, Half of a Yellow Sun, by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  What an excellent writer she is!  Five memorable characters in 1960s Nigeria discover which are the ties that bind - or don't.  Ties of family, ethnicity, politics, love, country, class - all of these come into play.  This is one of my "desert island" books.


One of the best things about this challenge was discovering writers who were new to me.  For Australia/Oceania, I was introduced to a wonderful writer, well-known to Australians, Tim Winton, author of Cloudstreet.  This saga is about two very different working-class families who live in a huge, old house called Cloudstreet in Perth and covers 20 years of joy, tragedy, marriage, birth, and death.  The writing is both earthy and spiritual (and there's a bit of magical realism involved).  Heartwarming and heartbreaking and highly recommended. 

 
My North American stop involved another new-to-me writer, Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies.  This is a fictionalized story of the Mirabal sisters, four sisters who opposed the corrupt and murderous dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, in the 1950s.  The story is told in flashbacks with alternating points of view so that we come to know each of the sisters as individuals with virtues and flaws, and the reader sees how each came to find herself resisting the Trujillo regime.  Anyone who wants to read about strong, female characters will appreciate this novel. 


For South America, I chose a non-fiction book, Fordlandia, The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin.  This is one of those forgotten history stories, that of a rather bizarre attempt to build Ford's vision of a small American town in the middle of the Amazon.  Fordlandia, as the town was called, was supposed to be the headquarters of a rubber plantation (tires for all those model Ts!).  If you're thinking that plunking a mid-western industrial plant and town in the jungle and expecting success isn't going to go well, you're right.  It turns into a fascinating and at times funny story of man vs. nature.  Spoiler alert: nature will always win.

My "reader's choice" and final stop was back in Asia: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.  Set in India during the government-declared State of Emergency in 1975, it tells of four people in an unnamed city (speculation is that the author had Mumbai in mind): a shrewd widow, a naive student, and two tailors from a small village, all of whom live in the widow's apartment.  The novelist has been compared to Dickens, and I think that's right in his scope and in his empathy for so many different characters in all kinds of situations.  This one really stayed with me; I can remember scenes from it as though I read it last week.  Wonderful.    

So there we are: around the world in 7 books!   As always, thanks to Books are My Favourite and Best for the Six Degrees meme.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to be an armchair traveler: to go any place, any time, to meet anyone.  What are your favorite armchair travel books?







Saturday, March 3, 2018

Six Degrees of Separation - March 2018

And we're off!


This month we're starting with Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth.





You know who was a beauty and mythical?  Helen of Troy, who appears in many great works, including Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"  If you haven't seen this play, give it a try.  It's seriously great - Dr. Faustus, in deciding to sell his soul to the devil is possibly the first anti-hero.


 

The devil does love to make an appearance in literature, and in modern times, too.  Take Rosemary's Baby, by Ira Levin.  Far creepier than Faustus!  And set in the Bramford, which we all know is really the marvel of 19th century NYC architecture, The Dakota.  







And when speaking of great NYC architecture, Rockefeller Center -home of 30 Rock and Radio City Music Hall - will definitely be on that list.  To learn more about the politics and personalities behind its construction, read Pulitzer Prize finalist, Great Fortune, by Daniel Okrent. 


 


There are all kinds of theaters in NYC, from Radio City Music Hall to the low-rent, Second Avenue, Bowery location of the movie theater box office staffed by Saint Mazie - the "Queen of the Bowery" who sells tickets and takes care of the homeless during the Great Depression.  A wonderful novel by Jami Attenberg that is both funny and touching.



 
In The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, on the other hand, the Great Depression is raw and real.  This is the story of young men who have already lived through the hardest of hard times, striving for something better.   A college education at the University of Washington, a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, personal redemption, learning to trust.    




Set in Seattle 70 years later and a few miles away from where the boys practiced rowing, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple is many miles away in tone!  It is a spot-on satire of life in Seattle, complete with tech nerds, virtual personal assistants (or are they?), competitive helicopter parents, unrelenting political correctness, coffee, and blackberries (Puget Sounders will laugh knowingly about the blackberries). 




So there we go - from serious to humorous in six steps!  Happy Reading!  


Six Degrees of Separation is courtesy of Books are My Favourite and Best










 


Saturday, February 3, 2018

Six Degrees of Separation - February 2018

This month's starting point for Six Degrees is George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, which is on my never-ending TBR.  And while I haven't read it, I know that the author's starting point for this story came from Abraham Lincoln's visits to the cemetery where his young son was buried.



Degree #1 - Also based on a real cemetery is Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, a work of contemporary fiction set in and next door to London's Highgate cemetery.  The exotic, slightly creepy nature of this famous Victorian cemetery is a fabulous setting.







Degree #2 - The Victorians did love their cemeteries!  I usually think of the Victorians as rather dull: repressed, dutiful, pious.  But of course, not all of them were any of those things.  Including Richard and Isabel Burton, the subjects of A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton, by Mary S. Lovell.  They lived a life of adventure and their marriage - of two strong minded people - makes for fascinating reading.






Degree # 3 - How do you find your mate?  In The Marriage Bureau: The True Story of How Two Matchmakers Arranged Love in Wartime London, by Penrose Halson, gives us the (often quite amusing) story of the matchmaking business.




Degree # 4 - Set in London, this time in the aftermath of war - World War I - is The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters.  A tale of social change, social class, and murder, all based on a real event, this is a fine work of historical and literary fiction.








Degree # 5 -  Murder?!  Why that makes me think of one of my favorite novels: The Secret History, By Donna Tartt.  If you haven't read it, you're in for a treat.  Written in mesmerizing prose, it is the story of students at an elite and eccentric college.  You know who the victim and perpetrators are from the beginning; it's the unraveling of the why that is so fascinating.


Degree # 6 - Universities make a fine setting for novels, and Moo, by Jane Smiley, is no different.  After cemeteries, war, and murder, I leave you with this very amusing story of academic life at a Midwestern agricultural college.  Enjoy!






Six Degrees is courtesy of Books are My Favourite and Best

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Six Degrees of Separation - January 2018

Today, I'm joining in Six Degrees of Separation starting with the first in the well loved series No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith with its wonderful character, Mma Ramatswe.

I didn't think I'd read many series of books with strong female protagonists, but it turns out I have, starting with A Killer in King's Cove by Iona Whishaw, the story of former British spy and current amateur sleuth Lane Winslow in post-WWII British Columbia, which leads to:

Black Roses by Jane Thynne, a series featuring Clara Vine, British actress and part-time spy living in pre-WWII Berlin, and on to:

A change from those darker series with The Lanvin Murders by Angela M. Sanders.  This series brings its readers to the world of vintage fashion in Portland, Oregon with heroine Joanna Hayworth.

Next we move to the historical fiction genre and Evelyn Anthony's oldie-but-goodie series about Russian Tsarinas, starting with Rebel Princess, the story of Catherine the Great.

A fine example of dystopian fiction/sci-fi from the brilliant Margaret Atwood is the MaddAdam trilogy: Oryx and Crake is the first in the series.

And finally, the bring this full circle, let's go back to Africa, South Africa this time with Sally Andrew's wonderful Tannie Maria mystery series Recipes for Love and Murder


Six Degrees is courtesy of:  Books are My Favorite and Best