Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month we’re starting with Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his shocking stabbing, Knife, which I’ve yet to read
Hard to follow that so I’m linking by title to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s superb short story collection How to Pronounce Knife about the experience of immigrants and refugees.
Thammavongsa won the Giller Prize in 2020, a prize I like to keep an eye on. The last winner I read was Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter about a young man of colour working hard on Canada’s cross country night train in 1929.
Alex Schulman’s Malma Station (transl. Rachel Willson Broyles) sees three characters travelling the same train route through rural Sweden set across three different timelines.
Mikael Niemi’s historical crime novel To Cook a Bear (transl. Deborah Bragen-Turner) is also set deep in the Swedish countryside.
Linking by title again to Franz Olivier-Giesbert’s Himmler’s Cook (transl. Anthea Bell) who’s formidable 105-year-old narrator has lived through many of the twentieth-century’s darkest hours but kept her sense of humour.
William Boyd’s Logan Mountstuart also rubs shoulders with many who shaped the twentieth century in Any Human Heart.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from an horrific attack on a renowned author to a novel telling the story of the last century through a bystander with diversions to Canada and Sweden along the way. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
