It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Life of M by Rachel Cusk. I haven’t read this book, but here’s what it’s about:

M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.

Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths – about the very experience of living – might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work?

I struggled to find a clever first link to start this month’s chain, so I’ve gone with a very simple link to a book with a similar title: Yann Martel’s Booker Prize winner, Life of Pi (1), in which an Indian boy, Pi, finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan – and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker!

There’s also a tiger in Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (2). Jaffy Brown comes face to face with it in the streets of London and the experience leads to him being offered a job with Mr Jamrach, a dealer in wild animals. For the next few years Jaffy works at Jamrach’s menagerie, helping to take care of the animals – until one day he gets the chance to go to sea in search of a ‘dragon’. I loved this entertaining historical adventure novel, my favourite of the three books I’ve read by Birch.

The Georgian Menagerie by Christopher Plumb (3) shares a word in the title and is an interesting non-fiction book about the history of exotic animals and birds in 18th century London. As you can imagine, it’s sad to read about the treatment some of these creatures received once they were removed from their natural habitats and exhibited to the public, but there are also lots of fascinating and amusing anecdotes.

There’s a sort of menagerie in Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (4), although it focuses on only one type of animal. This unusual novel follows the story of the Bigtree family who run an alligator-themed amusement park in the Everglades. I found this book a bit uneven, but loved the imaginative setting, complete with theme park attractions such as daily alligator wrestling shows, the Bigtree family museum and the Swamp Café!

I tried to think of an alligator link, but I could only come up with a crocodile one! Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (5) is the first in the Amelia Peabody mystery series, about a Victorian lady with a passion for archaeology. Like most of the books in the series, this one is set in Egypt. Unless I’ve forgotten, I don’t think there were any real crocodiles in the novel – the title comes from an ancient Egyptian poem.

There is an actual crocodile in one of the stories in the collection A Bad Business by Fyodor Dostoevsky (6). The story is appropriately titled The Crocodile and is about a Russian civil servant, Ivan Matveich, who is swallowed alive by a crocodile being exhibited in St Petersburg. It’s a fascinating and surprisingly funny story. There are five others included in the book, all in new translations by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater.

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And that’s my chain for October! The chain has an animal theme and the links have included: ‘Life of’ titles; tigers; the word Menagerie; animal parks; alligators and crocodiles.

In November, in recognition of Novellas in November, we’ll be starting with a novella that’s on our reading list.