TCL’s #6Degrees of Separation for October 3, 2026 – #DNF Edition! – The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog
This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain. The rules are:
- Link the books together in any way you like.
- Provide a link in your post to the meme at Books are My Favourite and Best.
- Share these rules in your post.
- Paste the link to your post in the comments on Kate’s post and/or the Linky Tool on that post.
- Invite your blog readers to join in and paste their links in the comments and/or the Linky Tool.
- Share you post on Twitter using the #6Degrees hash tag.
- Be nice! Visit and comment on other posts and/or retweet other #6Degrees posts.
This month we were supposed to start with our book group’s current selection or, for those not in a book group, a book we are currently reading. But… I had another idea (and I hope Kate W doesn’t mind my twist)!
This month Kate wanted us to start with Life of M by Rachel Cusk. Well, since this is a novella, and what with September being the month for short stories, and the fact that my ARC reading list was on the thin side, I decided I’d whole hog and BUY the eBook of this from Amazon. What. A. Mistake! I tried… I really tried to read this, but I failed, miserably. I mean, she ticked me off to begin with her “I was thinking of writing her autobiography” Um… hello? YOU can’t write someone else’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY; an autobiography is written by themselves. Yeah, sure… ghostwriters and/or collaborations but still. For me, it was downhill after that. All these tiny, minute, overly specific, descriptions of places were tedious (and no, even with the extensive details she includes, I couldn’t picture these places she was describing – that’s a bad sign for me). And the first-person plural passages – um… who are the WE in these bits? And if the WE were the narrator/author and M, it seemed pretty pretentious and self-absorbed to assume she could get inside M’s head like that and assume that they’re of one mind. I finally gave up on it, and went on to something else. Furthermore, if I was Natalie Portman, and this was really was about me, I’d be pretty pissed off at how Cusk portrayed me, which was ultimately unflattering, and in many ways, offensive. Sorry for the rant… but it did give me an idea for this chain!
First Degree.
That’s right… I’m going to do a DNF chain. Since I’ve blogging, I’ve compiled a list of all the books I had to quit reading for one reason or another. At one point, I decided to do a #DNF Friday post to explain why I DNF some of these books. The first one I did was for “Bohemia” by Veronika Carnaby. In my post I said “… almost immediately upon beginning this novel, I found mixed metaphors, curious language, inconsistent character development (and not just because they decide to be spontaneous), action taking place that seems out of context and not matching with what happened so far in the story, use of American slang by a group of Brits (that didn’t feel like it was done ironically), and more.” I also found misused words, incomplete sentences, and even several glaring misspellings! Sorry, not sorry – 2/5 stars!
Second Degree.
Now this next one is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but I had several good reasons for DNFing “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly. This one pissed me off so much that, not only will I not quote anything from my non-review,” but I also decided to avoid her books from then on! (By the way, my NetGalley review gave it 3/5 stars, but on my post, I reduced it to only two!)
Third Degree.
I was also pissed off at “The Dark Lady’s Mask” by Mary Sharratt. Look, I know that lots of people believe that William Shakespeare couldn’t have written all the plays and poems credited to him, but all of the conjecture and ideas (nay, you could also call them conspiracy theories), have so many holes in them that they make Swiss cheese look totally solid. Sharratt decided to jump on that bandwagon and write a book on the premise that Shakespeare’s mistress actually wrote them. Would a woman writing plays want to pass them off as the work of a man during Elizabethan times? Possibly. But, Sharratt has this aristocratic woman discover an “unknown poet” and secrets him off to Italy to write his comedies! I’m afraid that put the nail in the coffin of this book, because no one has ever been able to find any proof that Shakespeare ever left England. (By the way, this didn’t stop me from reading and enjoying Sharratt’s subsequent novel “Ecstasy,” which I really liked, and which had one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen.)
Fourth Degree.
And then we have “Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan” by Ruth Gillian. I’m sure many people will automatically be put off by the multiple timelines in this book, only one of which was actually interesting to me. Now, Gillian writes nicely, but one of my pet peeves is making mistakes about aspects of Judaism and/or Jewish traditions, and Gillian blew this one BIG TIME for me. Why? Because while some things about being Jewish are pretty obscure, the one she made a mistake with was one of the best known things about the Jewish tradition of eating Kosher. (Actually, there were a couple smaller ones before the one that made me want to virtually throw this book against the wall. Tsk, tsk, tsk. 2/5 stars!)
Fifth Degree.
Another book that pissed me off was “Jackie and Maria” by Gill Paul. With this one, not only was it filled with historical inaccuracies about BOTH these women, it was also very poorly written. Sure, there was lots of conjecture about the very soft spoken Jackie Kennedy Onassis, but the woman wasn’t naive or stupid, as Paul made her out to be. Maria Callas was the very embodiment of the title Diva, so making her out to be cowed by her husband just didn’t work for me. I mean, that woman was a… er… female dog, with a capital B, so don’t try to tell me otherwise! Sorry Ms. Paul, you lost me as a reader, I’m afraid.
Sixth Degree.
I love a good book about the 1920s, and “Hotel Portofino” by J. P. O’Connell sounded like fun. Plus, it was touted that it would soon become a TV Series, so I figured, since the Brits make great drama series, I should read this before the show aired. Instead, it pissed me off because it was a truly hot mess of, well… sloppy writing, mundane dialogue, stupid plot points, stereotypical characters, and hardly any descriptions of a part of Italy that are, in reality, stunningly beautiful. What’s more, this O’Connell person seems to not exist outside these books, and didn’t even get writing credits for the TV series on IMDb. I’m guessing this is a pseudonym for someone too embarrassed to put their real name on the junk that was only published to promote the TV series. Sadly, the TV series wasn’t much better, except that at least it had some beautiful vistas to look at, but I’m sure they were all fake. I only watched two episodes of the first series, and DNF that as well!
There you have it – my chain of DNF books for this month. So… the question is, does this last book connect back to our starting novel?
YES, of course there is a connection – I couldn’t finish reading either of them!
If you are still interested in any of these books, I’ve given you links to either their Goodreads pages in my DNF Friday posts, and you are welcome to check them out (which I suggest you do, because I get quite naughty with some of them)!
If you decide to join in on this meme, I hope you’ll give me the link to your post in the comments below, and/or put your link on the linky page that Kate has on her blog for this meme.
Next month, on November 7, 2026, we will start with a novella on our reading list, in honor of the #NovNov, Novellas in November reading challenge. Hm…
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