Category Archives: Six Degrees

I am appalled that it is April already, and as it’s the first Saturday it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation Day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves starting off with one title, then linking six other books as they spring to mind. Kate usually chooses the starting book, but this month we were invited to start with “a travel book”.

Well, as it turns out, I have just this week returned from travel, having visited my son and his family in Cambodia. This has been my second trip there, and I enjoyed reading Norman Lewis’ book A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (my review here). It was written in 1951 and in parts is racist and stereotyping. So why would I want to read it? Mainly for its descriptions of landscape, the feeling of menace as he aligns himself with the French in an increasingly hostile environment, and the elegiac nostalgia for a lost time and lost culture, given all that was about to happen to these three countries in the following thirty years.

Graham Greene once said that Norman Lewis “is one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”. High praise indeed. It is said that Lewis’ book inspired Greene to travel to Vietnam to write The Quiet American which I read before I started blogging. Both books share a reserved, observational tone.

The Quiet American in Greene’s book was Alden Pyle, a CIA agent, posted to Vietnam during the Cold War. Here in Australia we had our own secret agents and Cold War conspiracies, and these are fictionalized in Andrew Croome’s Document Z (my review here).

The unfictionalized version is explored in Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair (again, read before I started blogging). I can’t imagine that anyone could add any more to Manne’s account.

The Petrov Affair fed right into Robert Menzies’ unexpected victory over the Labor Party at the 1954 election. Judith Brett’s Menzies’ Forgotten People describes Menzies’ capture of the ‘middling type’ in Australia through his radio broadcasts and projection of a fatherly-type of Prime Minister that John Howard worked hard to emulate. I would hope that we’ve grown up enough not to need Daddy anymore.

‘Doc’ Evatt was leader of the Opposition Labor Party in 1954, and he appeared as attorney for his staff members when the Petrov Affair culminated in the Royal Commission on Espionage . Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy explores Evatt’s career as historian, attorney, politician, Chief Justice and President of the UN General Assembly (my review here).

A later Governor-General who immersed himself in Evatt’s historical writing was Sir John Kerr, whose career has been criticized strongly by Jenny Hocking in The Dismissal Dossier (my review here). Hocking has been pursuing the correspondence between Kerr and the Palace for many years – the historian as heroine!

I seem to have immersed myself in politics here, which seems an odd tangent from a travel book!

First Saturday, so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest. She chooses the starting book – in this case, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett- and participants think of six titles that they associate, springing from that original book.

Although I have read several Ann Patchett books, I haven’t read Tom Lake, but that’s par for the course because I almost never have read the books with which she starts her chain. This time I’m going completely by the title of the book, jumping from one word in the title to its use in the next title in the chain. I confess to having to resort to the sub-title at times, but it’s still on the front cover! So…Tom Lake…

Blue Lake by David Sornig is subtitled ‘Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp’ and it deservedly won the Judges’ Special Prize in the Victorian Community History Awards in 2019. Sornig describes himself a writer and a psychogeographer, not a historian, but this is beautifully written history that starts with Blue Lake, known variously as Batman’s Swamp, Batman’s Lagoon, the North Melbourne or West Melbourne swamp, now a vast construction site. The narrative shifts back and forward as the narrator walks – literally – what he called ‘the Zone’, while he also delves archives, sifts newspapers, follows up family history links. (Read my review here)

Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe is about Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’ painting. Presented in three parts, Parts I and III are told by Blue Poles the painting itself as narrator- something that requires the reader to suspend disbelief and cynicism. It is, as Yes Minister would say, a “courageous” narrative decision. Part II is told by Alyssa, an academic art historian, who many years earlier had done some conservation work on Blue Poles. I must admit that I found this second part of the book rather unsatisfactory, although it did work as vehicle by which the author could work in the factual information about the painting. (Read my review here)

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf is a simple, affirming, grown-up book and an absolute gem! It’s only 179 broadly spaced pages long, but it’s gentle and wise and sad and when I finished it too late into the night, I sat in bed and cried. (Read my review here).

Statements from the Soul: The Moral Case for the Uluru Statement edited by Shireen Morris and Damien Freeman. Although the Uluru Statement comes ‘from the heart’, it is not hard to sense its moral force. Religion does not have a monopoly on moral thinking, but this particular volume contains essays from people of faith, speaking about their moral response to the Uluru Statement and talking about the elements of their own faith that have brought them to that position. I am heart-broken that moral force was not enough. (Read my review here).

Return to Uluru by Mark McKenna explores the shooting of Anangu man Yokununna in a cave nestling within Uluru by Northern Territory policeman Bill McKinnon back in 1934. I sometimes bridle at the historian-as-detective trope that is used to pump up the narrative in order to make a history more ‘saleable’, but here it is absolutely justified. Coming to a case some 80 years later, and in a world where the politics of indigenous history are changing but still contested, McKenna tracks down some interesting leads and sources, some of which make him reflect on the sheer, remorseless plunder of indigenous country, others which challenge the ethics of doing history. (Read my review here)

Australian writer Christopher Koch makes a return, too, in his book The Many Coloured Land: Return to Ireland. As a reader, I have little red flags that pop up when authors do particular things. I must confess that when the book started with family history, I inwardly groaned. Family history, while fascinating to the descendant, can be rather eye-glazing for other people, unless it’s contextualized and the author has convinced you that it’s going to be worth your while. Nor do I enjoy descriptions of food, and I don’t really care what people look like. This book violated all of these no-go zones at times. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it. It’s a beautifully written plaiting-together of historic research, family history, travel narrative and memoir. (Read my review here).

I seem to have travelled all over the place in my chain: West Melbourne, Canberra, a small town in Colorado, Uluru and finally Ireland.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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)
3. 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).
4. 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).
5. 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)
6. 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….

First Saturday of the month means Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme is hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest. The idea is that she gives a starting title, then associates six other books with it- and then invites her readers to do the same. The starting book is Anna Funder’s Wifedom, which of course I haven’t read, but at least this time I have actually heard of it. I know that it’s written about George Orwell’s wife Eileen Blair, who was eclipsed into oblivion by her husband’s career and fame. And here I’m going to do the same by jumping straight to her husband Eric Blair.

George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxist against Franco’s Nationalist Forces. Homage to Catalonia is his response to this experience. He writes so well: such an astute observer, self-deprecating, and willing to admit shades of grey and possible error.

George Orwell was just one of a shifting cast of writers and intellectuals who travelled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War in Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War. In her author’s note, Vaill writes that it is a “narrative, not an academic analysis”. The linchpin of her narrative is the once-deluxe Hotel Florida, a hotel in Madrid, frequented by government figures and journalists.  The six main ‘characters’ of her book all stay there at one time or another: writer Ernest Hemingway and journalist Martha Gellhorn, war photographer Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, and press officers/censors/propagandists Arturo Barea and Isla Kulscar. (See my review here)

But to be honest, I don’t really know much about the Spanish Civil War, which is why I read Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country‘s Hidden Past before I visited the south of Spain a few years back. Throughout the book he refers to the ‘two Spains’ – the conservative, religious Spain and the outward-looking, liberal if not socialistic Spain – that still exist in Spain today. The first three chapters are about Franco and the Spanish Civil War and the general agreement to look the other way and leave well enough alone. (See my review here)

“Leave well enough alone” has been the attitude towards murders and injustice, not just in Spain but in Australia too, and that’s what Luke Stegeman addresses in Amnesia Road. He travels the backroads of Queensland as a boxing referee, while he refers to Spain as his ‘second patria‘. Deeply familiar with both, he brings them together in what is described as a “literary examination” of landscape, violence and memory in the two places. (See my review here).

Moving from south-west to south-east Queensland, Libby Connors’ Warrior takes us to south-east Queensland during the pre-Separation days of the frontier. She does this through the story of Dundalli, a Dalla man who was executed in January 1855 for the murder of Andrew Gregor and his pregnant (white) house-servant Mary Shannon in an attack on the Caboolture River. What this book does is hone in on one particular location; one constellation of tribal groups; a set of named, individual leaders.(My review here).

Which brings me finally to one of my very favourite books, Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers about a short window of opportunity, in the very first days of white invasion, when perhaps things might have been different. With the Voice referendum uppermost in my thoughts there are many other books that I could have linked to here, but I keep returning to Clendinnen’s beautiful prose and historical imagination.

So, in fitting with a book about the personal and political in the form of Eileen Blair, I’ve travelled to Spain, back to Queensland, and right back to the shores of Port Jackson. Next month’s starting book is I Capture the Castle– one of my very favourite books from my long-ago adolescence.

First Saturday means Six Degrees of Separation day, a meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. She chooses the starting book and you add six books that spring to mind. As usual, I have not read the starting book Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Apparently it’s about dementia, but literal soul that I am, my mind sprang to the ideas of ‘time’ and ‘shelter’ in putting together my list.

My starting book is Time Song by Julia Blackburn, chosen mainly because the name sounded similar to Time Shelter. It’s about her search for Doggerland , which existed in the North Sea and English Channel 18,000 years ago, making what we now know as the United Kingdom a contiguous part of Europe. Now on the bottom of the ocean, it was once a fertile plain, with its own coastlines and rivers, with humans roaming across it. It was not a route from one place to another, but a territory in its own right. (My review here).

The idea of uncovering layers of a lost place is explored in Peter Ackroyd’s London Under. It draws on the concept of London as a palimpsest, alternately destroyed and rebuilt, the same patterns or practices repeated on the same site, albeit in different manifestations, across the centuries. He advanced this characterization in his big baggy monster London: A Biography, but this is a slimmer volume, concentrating on rivers and underground networks. (My review here).

Nick Cooper’s London Underground at War also digs under the surface of London, but his emphasis is on the underground railway, and particularly its use as a shelter during World War II. It is largely a book of events and incidents, and it reads a bit like a report, without the poetry of Peter Ackroyd’s book. The presence of Londoners affected the Underground during the war, more than how the Underground affected them. (My review here).

The Blitz lends itself well to a fictional telling, and I loved Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch. Unlike Sarah Waters’ earlier books Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, this book is set during the 1940s. Waters’ narrative revolves around four main characters: Kay, Helen, Viv and Duncan. Her master stroke is to tell the narrative backwards, starting in 1947, then 1944 and finally 1941. (My review here).

Another book that shifts through time, with a starting point during World War II is Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual. It starts with the real-life death of 168 people who died in the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths in November 1944 in a V-2 attack on a Saturday lunchtime, with the shop crowded with shoppers. Fifteen of those 168 were aged under 11. Spufford fictionalizes five of these children: sisters Jo and Valerie, Alec, Ben and Vernon and then jumps forward as if the five children were not killed. In fact, they were not even in the store. Instead, they lived lives untouched by that November 1944 attack. He tells their counterfactual lives at ever-increasing chunks of time. It’s like a ‘Seven-up’ series on the page. (My review here)

A non-fiction book that deals with World War II is Molly Panter-Downes’ (what an unfortunate name) London War Notes 1939-1945. It is a collection of her “Letter from London” columns that were published in the New Yorker during the War.  The book is divided into seven sections, for each year of the war, each commencing with a brief one-page time line of major events during that year. She fictionalized much of this material in her short story collection Good Evening Mrs Craven which is well worth a read too – does that make six and a half? (See my review here)

So, most of my titles played around with the idea of ‘Time’ and ‘Shelter’, but ended up particularly England-focussed, without really meaning to be. I’ll have to roam further afield next time with August’s book Romantic Comedy.

First Saturday, so that means Six Degrees of Separation Day. This is a meme hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest, where she chooses a starting title, and you link six other books that are related in whatever way you choose. You can read the instructions for the meme here. It is a truth universally acknowledged that I have never read the starting book, and I haven’t this month either. It is Hydra by Adriane Howell, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2023.

So….. Hydra. There’s Hydra the island, and hydra the freshwater organism, but there’s also Hydra of the Greek myth, the monster with nine heads. I’ll go with the latter, which made me think of David Malouf’s Ransom, where Malouf takes a couple of lines from the Iliad, where King Priam travels to recover the body of his son Hector, which is being dragged behind a chariot by the crazed Achilles.

Thinking of Greece, I jump to Gillian Bouras’ A Stranger Here. Back in the 1980s Gillian Bouras used to write columns in the Age about her life in a Greek village, where she emigrated with her husband. A Stranger Here is a novel, but I suspect that it has strong autobiographical elements, where an older woman has experienced divorce and the chains of love for her son that keep her in Europe.

With an older woman as narrator, both chastened and emboldened by experience, it reminded me of Susan Johnson’s My Hundred Lovers (I bet that you thought I would go for Johnson’s biography of Charmian Clift instead).It is written as one hundred chapters, each very short consisting rarely of more than four pages, and sometimes as little as a paragraph. The hundred lovers here (such a daunting number!) are the spark between sensuousness and embodiment (in the sense of being in the body) and the whole range of a woman’s experiences.

A book with a similar title is Steven Lang’s 88 Lines about 44 Women, but the title does not refer to a countdown of lovers, but instead references a song by The Nails which I’d never heard of. There’s not 44 women it, either, just three and the main character is a washed-up rock singer, now living in a cold and isolated farmhouse in the Scottish Highlands.

Rock singers don’t come much bigger than Jimmy Barnes, although he grew up in Glasgow rather than the Scottish Highlands, before emigrating with his poor, violent family to Elizabeth in South Australia. I read Working Class Boy but I don’t seem to have blogged it, although I did see the documentary. They are both excellent.

Another boy from Scotland with a difficult childhood is in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, although his life took on a very different trajectory than that of rock star. It’s set in Thatcher’s United Kingdom – later than Jimmy Barnes’ book- and much of it is about his relationship with his alcoholic mother and his own conflicts about his sexuality.

So, I seem to have rattled around between Greece and Scotland, between blinding sunlight and cold, dank Scotland. Next month we start with Friendaholic. Guess what: I haven’t read that either.

It’s the first of April, first Saturday and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. This is a meme conducted through Kate’s BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest website, where she chooses the starting title, then you link six other titles that spring to mind.

The starting book for April is Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run. Of course, I haven’t read it – but that’s not unusual: I have rarely read the book that Kate chooses!

Bruce Springsteen is a singer, but I must confess to neither liking nor disliking him. But one group that I really did like was The Beatles (I’m showing my age) and I’m a sucker for anything Beatle-related. Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time takes a chronological approach, from the earliest days of playing together and goes through to their last performance on the roof of the building in London. It is written as a series of short chapters – 150 of them – some a few pages in length, some only taking up a page. It’s a very long book at over 600 pages, and the chapters range from facts, personal reminiscence, counterfactual and events that were only tangentially related. In fact, when I finished I wondered if it was even worth it. You can read my review here.

Someone who could count a bit further than four is Grace Lisa Vandenburg, the main character in Toni Jordan’s Addition. Grace counts things obsessively and incessantly, as a way of trying to control her world and all around her. Into this ordered and tense life comes Seamus, who is attracted to her humour and quickness, and steers her towards therapy and medication as a way of overcoming her obsessiveness. We lose our perky, wisecracking, passionate and controlled narrator as the medication submerges her into a slow, passive inertia. Will she lose the medication or lose her man? Or both? And what is the line between eccentricity and madness? It’s a feel-good romantic fiction book- not my usual fare, but certainly good for reading situations when you want something light. My review is here.

A far more searing and uncomfortable approach to ‘madness’ can be found in Kate Richards’ memoir of that name Madness: A Memoir. Kate is a qualified doctor, but years of mental illness have made this career path untenable for her. There is this chaotic, obsessive, hyper-sensitive existence inside her head that somehow co-exists falteringly with the semblance of a ‘normal’ life: a job in medical research, friends, parents, a flat. This is such a brave book. It is simply written, but it is hard to read. I reviewed it here.

A woman being manipulated into thinking that she was mad is a popular trope, but one of the early writers to explore it was Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White. This door-stopper of a book at over 600 pages has all the usual Victorian tropes: grand houses, fortune hunters, madness, swapped identities, secrets, dastardly deeds, swirling fog and graveyards. It uses a favourite Victorian technique of doubles: two sisters; two houses; two villains. But what is really striking about this book is how modern it is in its use of multiple narrators, who handball the narrative between them, and a real sense of tension that mounts through the book. You might not think it, but this 600 page book is almost unputdownable! You can read my review here.

Wilkie Collins was a good friend of Charles Dickens, and their books (most of which came out in serialized form) are long, intricate and a damned good read. I could have gone for any one of Dickens’ books, or a biography of Dickens but instead, I’ll plump for some social history with What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool. The book is a cradle-to-grave, upstairs-to-downstairs explanation of the domestic and social world of the characters one might find in Victorian literature. It explains clothes, food, business practices, social manners and expectations etc in a rather whimsical fashion. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you don’t really need to have read particularly widely to enjoy it. It is divided into two parts- the first is organized thematically, while the second part is a glossary of particular terms and phrases that you’re likely to encounter in reading Victorian novels. The book is intended as a bit of a hoot, and in that way it probably fulfils the promise of its catchy title perfectly. I reviewed it here.

So, I bet you think I’m going to finish up with a Jane Austen. Not quite. Instead I’ll finish with P.D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley which is a mash-up of Austen’s characters in Pride and Prejudice with a crime fiction novel. The scenario is this: Darcy and Elizabeth have been happily ensconced at Pemberley for the past six years where Elizabeth has duly delivered two Darcy heirs. It is the eve of the traditional Pemberley ball instituted by Darcy’s mother Lady Anne. Sweet Jane and Bingley have arrived early, Darcy’s sister Georgiana is fending off two suitors in Colonel Fitzwilliam and the young lawyer Mr Alveston, the silver is being polished and the house is crackling with anticipation. Suddenly the preparations are disrupted by Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia Wickham, arriving unannounced and hysterical, shrieking that Wickham has been murdered in the nearby wood. He hasn’t , but his friend Captain Denny has. I shall go no further… but here’s my review.

Can I possibly link Bruce Springsteen with Pemberley? Maybe I can. Apparently Bruce Springsteen used to live in a mansion too, albeit in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Not Pemberley, perhaps but not too shabby….