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 Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize winning Orbital which I’ve yet to read by I know is loved by many blogger pals whose opinions I trust.
Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital takes its readers on a walk around the M25 which I gather is not as dull as it sounds.
Sinclair’s name is closely associated with the term ‘psychogeography’ something Dan Rhodes takes a pop at in Sour Grapes, his enjoyable satire on the literary world.
Rhodes has a lot of fun with Wilberforce Selfram, a lanky pedant with an abstruse vocabulary, a barely disguised Will Self who wrote an introduction for a long-ago edition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I wrote the reading group guide but I don’t think that was mentioned on the cover…
Hoban’s novel is written in an imagined post-apocalyptic version of English as is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
Leading me to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson’s fictionalised coming-of-age story about growing up as a lesbian in a strict Pentecostal family.
Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience sees another young woman briefly returning to the strict religious community from which she walked away so that she can attend her ex-girlfriend’s wedding.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a novel set over a day on a spacecraft to another in which a woman revisits her past, finding it more complex than she’d thought. 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.