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 Emily Maguire’s Stella Prize longlisted Rapture which I’ve not read but I’ve seen described as inspired by ‘a thousand-year-old story of female empowerment’ which makes me want to.
I’m linking by title to Claire McGlasson’s The Rapture about a millenarian sect known as The Panacea Society based in Bedford where I lived for several years, unaware of its existence.
John Bunyan lived, preached and was imprisoned in Bedford. About the only thing I remember from my childhood reading of his The Pilgrim’s Progress is the Slough of Despond.
Bringing to mind John Betjeman’s poem in which he, somewhat unkindly, urges ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on Slough, included in his Collected Poems.
St Pancras has a statue of John Betjeman which I featured on one of my travel posts and saw again on Monday on my way to Ghent. He looks as if he might be checking the sky for those bombs. I read Megan Bradbury’s Everyone is Watching on the same holiday which features photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Leading me to Susana Fortes’s Waiting for Robert Capa, about the founder of Magnum photos and his lover, fellow photographer, Gerda Taro, who lost her life in the Spanish Civil War.
Georgina Harding’s The Gun Room is about another war photographer whose life is changed by an iconic image of a soldier in Vietnam.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from the story of a nineth-century woman who disguises herself as a man to attain her ambition to a war photographer’s experience of unwanted fame. 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.
