Not only the first Saturday in the month, but the first Saturday of 2024 as well, and so I rather belatedly turn my attention to the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest. She chooses the starting book- in this case, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow– and participants bounce off six titles evoked from the starting book.
As usual, I haven’t read Kate’s starting book, and indeed have never heard of it, so on the basis of one word in the title alone, off I go.
- Clearly the word is ‘tomorrow’ and the book that sprang to mind was Phillip Gourvitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. As you would guess from the title, this book deals with the 1994 Rwandan genocide which saw between 500,000 and 800,000 people die in a hundred days of violence between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
- A similar book, with a similar title, which I read recently was Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father. Another genocide, but this time in Cambodia, where Pol Pot and his Kymer Rouge forces systematically murdered between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodian citizens (my review here)
- I’ve visited both Rwanda and Cambodia, and their memorial sites, and moving away from the genocide theme (slightly- though let’s not mention the Mau Mau) let’s go to Kenya instead which I have also visited. Although its name might seem to fit into the genocide theme, Richard Crompton’s Hells Gate is actually a detective novel set in Hell’s Gate National Park at Lake Naivasha, not far from Nairobi. (My review here).
- I’m not usually a great detective fiction aficionado, but I’ve really been enjoying big fat Robert Galbraith novels. Robert Galbraith is of course the nom-de-plume for J. R. Rowling, and I can actually follow these stories and can clearly tell you “who dun it” at the end of the book. The Cuckoo’s Calling was the first in the series about the murder of a high-end fashion model, and in it Galbraith establishes her detectives Comoran Strike and his secretary/sidekick Robyn. (My review here).
- And back to the original and one of the best of detective novels with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, published in book form in 1860. It’s long too, and rather convoluted with lots of convenient coincidences, but a thoroughly enjoyable read. (My review here)
- Wilkie Collins was good friends with Charles Dickens and although I could have chosen any number of Dickens’ novels, I’ve gone with a spin-off in Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip. Mr Watts, the last white man living in Bougainville after its descent into civil war in 1990 introduces his school children to Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’, which also happens to be one of my favourite books. (My review here)
None of which has anything to do with video games, which I gather is one of the themes in the original Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow starting book. But I guess that’s where Six Degrees of Separation can take you….
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 