The First Saturday of the month is Six Degrees Day. This meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best involves her choosing a starting book, then you linking the titles or themes of six other books. But this month was a little different because instead of Kate choosing the book, you were invited to start with your bookgroup’s current read. I attend two book groups: the first group with about 7 of us now called ‘Rosanna Readers’ was in the past a CAE bookgroup, and the second is the Ivanhoe Reading Circle, a more formal, meeting based group that was established in 1920. During September, the Reading Circle read Hannah Kent’s Always Home Always Homesick.
This book is a memoir of Kent’s sojourn in Iceland as a 17 year old on a Rotary exchange visit, her love for Iceland and its inspiration for her first book Burial Rites which was published to great acclaim after a spirited bidding war for publishing rights.
- It would come as no surprise that I chose Burial Rites as the first link. As probably everyone knows, the book is a ‘speculative biography’ of Agnes Magnusdottir, who was executed for murder in Iceland in 1829. Awaiting sentence, she is interned on a remote farm, where enforced proximity draws her into the circle of her keeper’s family. (See my review here)
- In writing Burial Rites, Kent looked to Margaret Atwood’s approach to writing Alias Grace, also about a woman charged with murder. Atwood had written “Where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent”. I read Alias Grace before starting this blog, but there are similarities between the two books both in subject matter and approach.
- Always Home, Always Homesick is about the author’s love for Iceland and the continuing pull it exerts upon her. Kent references Haldor Laxness’ Independent People several times, and to be honest, I think that it’s the only book that I have read set in Iceland. I read this 23 years ago, long before this blog and I can’t remember much of it except the bleakness of the sheepfarmer living his stubbornly independent life in a turf hut in the bitter cold.
- While we’re in the cold, I just recently read Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter which is set in a small English village in the winter of 1962-3 when England was plunged into freezing conditions between Boxing Day 1962 until the spring of 1963. It’s a very domestic story of two neighbouring families, set in an exceptional climate event. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, and I think it would have been a very worthy winner (but it wasn’t). My review is here.
- As denoted by the title, much of Hannah Kent’s book Always Home Always Homesick addresses the theme of homesickness. Could any writer have done it better than Colm Toibin with Brooklyn? The film was fantastic- perhaps even better than the book? My review here.
- Homesickness going the other way is addressed in Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World a beautifully nuanced book about nostalgia, motherhood and the sense of ‘home’. Set between 1963 and 1966, English-born Charlotte has been plunged into rapid motherhood, long before she feels ready. Ground down by the sheer mindlessness and fatigue of dealing with babies, she acquiesces in her husband’s dream of emigrating to Australia and ends up in stark, hot, sun-drenched Perth. My review is here.
A very fiction-y Six Degrees for me this time but I’ve managed to move between Australia, Iceland, English, Brooklyn and Ireland.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 