It’s the first Saturday of the month (and of the year!) 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.

The book we are starting with this month is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, a book I read a few years ago and didn’t enjoy as much as I had thought I would. Published in 1969 but set in 1867, the style is an unusual blend of the Victorian and the modern, which didn’t quite work for me.

When I have read the first book in the chain, it usually makes it easier to get started, but not this time! I included The French Lieutenant’s Woman in a previous chain a few months ago where I linked it from another metafiction novel and to another book set in Lyme Regis. As I didn’t want to use the same links again, I had to think of something different and all I’ve been able to come up with is books with ‘French’ in the title. This leads me to Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier.

The Frenchman of the title is the pirate Jean-Benoit Aubéry. A novel I read last year which also involves pirates (although these pirates are not as charming as Jean-Benoit) is The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson. Set in the 17th century, the novel tells the story of a group of people abducted during a Barbary pirate raid on Iceland and taken in captivity to Algeria.

Iceland and Algeria are both fascinating countries to read about and I enjoyed the contrast between both settings in The Sealwoman’s Gift. I’ve read a few other books set in Iceland and the one I’m going to link to here is Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, a beautifully written novel about an Icelandic woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

Thinking about Burial Rites reminds me of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Alias Grace is set in Canada, not Iceland, but otherwise the two books have a lot in common. They both give fictional accounts of real women who were convicted of murder (Grace Marks, in the case of Atwood’s novel).

I have read a few of Atwood’s other books, most recently Hag-Seed, which is a clever re-telling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Also inspired, at least in a small part, by The Tempest is This Rough Magic, one of my favourite books by Mary Stewart. The title comes from a line spoken by Prospero in the play (“this rough magic I here abjure”).

Mary Stewart’s books (apart from her Arthurian series) are a combination of suspense, romance and mystery and feature young heroines in exotic or atmospheric settings. M.M. Kaye’s Death In… novels from the same era remind me of Stewart’s in many ways, although I find them slightly darker. I have read three, including Death in Cyprus, and still have the rest to look forward to.

And that’s my chain for this month…Frenchmen, pirates, Iceland, female prisoners, The Tempest and romantic suspense!

In February, we will be starting with Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.

It’s the first weekend of a new 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.

The first book this month is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, for once a book that I’ve actually read! I used Vanity Fair in a previous chain a few months ago and linked it to Little Women, which has a chapter entitled “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair”. I don’t want to use the same link again, so I’ve come up with a different one this time.

Vanity Fair is a Victorian novel published in 1848, but set in the earlier Regency period. Another novel written in the Victorian era but with an earlier setting (much earlier in this case) is George Eliot’s Romola, a long and detailed story of Renaissance Italy. I found it a challenging book to read but definitely worth the effort.

My next link is easy. I love reading about Renaissance Italy and have read a lot of novels with that setting. Like Romola, Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus is set in 15th century Florence just after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and therefore covers some of the same historical events – although the story is very different.

The title, The Birth of Venus, is the name of a painting by Botticelli (although that’s not what the story is about). Another novel which uses the name of a famous painting as its title is Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Delft in the 1660s.

Scarlett Johansson played the title character in the film version of this book with Colin Firth as the artist Vermeer. Colin Firth has also appeared in several other adaptations of books and plays, including Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in which he starred as Jack Worthing. I don’t often read plays but I loved that one so I’m going to use it as the next book in my chain.

Oscar Wilde is known for his humour and The Importance of Being Earnest has a lot of great lines. I don’t always find books funny that are supposed to be funny, but one that I do think is hilarious is Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I sometimes find myself reaching for it to re-read favourite scenes when I need to cheer myself up.

One of those favourite scenes involves Harris getting lost in the Hampton Court Maze. I love mazes and labyrinths and I’ve actually just finished a book that would have been the perfect choice to link to next. I prefer to choose books that I’ve already reviewed here on my blog, though, so instead I am linking to The Red Lily Crown by Elizabeth Loupas, which features a labyrinth in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. Florence, of course, was also the setting for the second and third books in my chain.

And that’s it for this month! My links have included Renaissance Italy, paintings, actors, funny books and mazes. Have you read any of my choices?

Next month we will be starting with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

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.

The first book this month is The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, As usual this is a book that I haven’t read and know almost nothing about. I have discovered that Hinton wrote the novel as a teenager and was only eighteen when it was published in 1967.

Another author who wrote her first novel as a teenager was Marjorie Bowen – sixteen at the time of writing The Viper of Milan, although the book didn’t find a publisher for a few more years because it was considered too violent for such a young woman to have written. Graham Greene described it as one of the books which influenced his own writing career, so I did try to use that fact as my next link, but found it too difficult as I have never actually read anything by Greene.

Instead, I am going to link to another book with ‘Viper’ in the title: Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre, a novel set at the court of Charles I. I haven’t read it yet, but hope to read it soon for my Walter Scott Prize Project (it was shortlisted for the prize in 2015). Reading the reviews, I’m not sure whether it will really be my sort of book, but I’m looking forward to trying it.

Seeing the name Hermione always reminds me of Harry Potter. That would be too obvious, though, so I tried to think of another book which features a character with that name and came up with Hermione Danglars, the wife of one of the villains in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Unfortunately, on checking my copy of the book I discovered that Madame Danglars is actually Hermine, not Hermione – but I think that’s close enough and, anyway, The Count is one of my favourite books of all time, so I really want to include it in the chain!

My next link is another tenuous one, but because it’s October and Halloween is on its way I think it’s quite appropriate. In The Count of Monte Cristo, the main character, Edmond Dantès, is referred to several times as ‘Lord Ruthven’, because of the paleness of his skin. Lord Ruthven is the vampire in John Polidori’s 1819 story, The Vampyre, one of the earliest and most influential vampire stories in English literature.

Polidori was a friend of Lord Byron’s and The Vampyre was actually inspired by Byron’s own attempt at writing a vampire novel (which remained unfinished and has become known as Fragment of a Novel). I have read a few books in which Byron features as a character (Passion by Jude Morgan and Glorious Apollo by E Barrington come to mind) but the one I’m going to use in my chain is The White Devil by Justin Evans.

The White Devil is a ghost story set at the British public school, Harrow, where a new boy bearing a strange resemblance to Byron has just arrived. Another novel I enjoyed which is set in a school, but with no ghosts this time, is Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie. It’s a Poirot mystery, but Poirot only appears towards the end – it was the school setting which made this book so much fun to read.

And that’s my chain for October! Have you read any of these books?

Next month we will be starting with Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – finally, a book that I’ve actually read!

It’s the first weekend of a new 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 begin with Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson. When I first saw that this was the starting point for the chain, I struggled to think of who Mara Wilson was, but I discovered she was the child actress in Mrs Doubtfire and Matilda.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is a great children’s book, but that’s not the book I’m going to choose for my first link. Instead I’m going to link to a non-fiction book about not just one Matilda, but four – Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland, Matilda of Boulogne and the Empress Matilda (sometimes known as Maud). The lives of these four medieval queens are explored in Alison Weir’s Queens of the Conquest.

One of the anecdotes I remember reading about Empress Matilda involves her escape from Oxford Castle during a siege wearing a white cape as camouflage against the snow. Thinking of women dressed in white leads me, quite obviously, to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

The Woman in White is one of my favourite Victorian novels and the intelligent, resourceful Marian Halcombe is one of my favourite heroines. Another Victorian novel with a strong and memorable, though very different, female protagonist is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.

It’s been a long time since I last read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, but it’s a book I loved when I was younger and read over and over again. I was sure I could remember a chapter with ‘Vanity Fair’ in the title, so I checked my old copy and yes – Chapter 9: Meg Goes To Vanity Fair. It’s amazing the things you remember!

Louisa May Alcott is one of several historical figures to appear as a character in Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen, a novel telling the story of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Frances is known to have exchanged a series of romantic poems with Edgar Allan Poe and this book explores their relationship.

And that brings me to my final link: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I chose a selection of stories from the book to re-read last Halloween and I’m thinking about doing the same this year.

That’s my chain for this month! Have you read any of these books?

Next month we will be starting with The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.

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.

The starting point this month is Atonement by Ian McEwan. As usual, I haven’t read it – but I do at least own a copy, which is a step in the right direction. Even without having read it, I know that it is often described as ‘metafiction’, which Wikipedia defines as ‘a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work’.

Taking metafiction novels as the first link in my chain this month, I could think of plenty of other examples, but the one I have chosen is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in Lyme Regis, which is where Louisa Musgrove in Jane Austen’s Persuasion falls and injures herself on the harbour steps. I struggled to think of where to take the chain next from Persuasion, though, so I decided to pick another book with a Lyme Regis setting instead – and that book is Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Remarkable Creatures is a fictional account of the lives and careers of two real-life 19th century fossil-collectors, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. Another 19th century woman, fictional this time, who is trying to make her way in the male-dominated world of natural sciences, is Cora Seaborne, the amateur naturalist in Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent. Mary Anning is one of Cora’s heroines, forming a strong link between these two books!

Moving on from The Essex Serpent, I have selected another novel with the word ‘serpent’ in the title. The Serpent Sword by Matthew Harffy is also historical fiction, but it’s a very different type of story, following the adventures of young warrior Beobrand, who sets out to avenge his brother’s death in 7th century Northumbria.

Northumbria was the name of the medieval kingdom which once encompassed a large part of northern England and the south-east of Scotland, and included the area now known as Northumberland. My next choice is a crime novel set in contemporary Northumberland: Dead Woman Walking by Sharon Bolton.

Dead Woman Walking opens with a group of people enjoying an early morning flight in a hot air balloon over the Northumberland National Park. And that leads me to my final link in the chain – Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, in which a very creepy character known as the Dust Witch flies above the rooftops of Green Town in a balloon.

And that’s my chain for August! Have you read any of these books?

Next month we will be starting with Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson.

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.

The starting point this month is Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I haven’t read it, but it seems that it is set in San Francisco.

Sometimes when I’m not familiar with the first book, I find it very difficult to get started with the chain, but this time I could think of several different directions to take. I eventually decided to go with books set in San Francisco; I can think of a few options, but the one I’ve chosen is Frog Music by Emma Donoghue. I remember really enjoying this novel, based on a true crime which happened in the 1870s.

The story takes place during a heatwave. We are in the middle of one now here in the UK. It’s been too hot for me, actually, but it is nice to be able to sit outside and read for a while when I get home from work. Thinking of other books that are set during long, hot summers, the first that comes to mind is Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, one of her Jackson Brodie mysteries in which a child goes missing while sleeping in a tent in the garden.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Kate Atkinson so far. The first book I read by her was Life After Life, in which Ursula Todd begins her life over and over again. The name Ursula makes me think of one of my recent reads, The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst, the story of a young woman in Restoration England – and that is the next book in my chain.

The Illumination of Ursula Flight has an unusual structure, with part of the story being told in the form of scripts from plays. I don’t read plays very often, but one that I did enjoy was French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. At one point during the first act, Cyrano fights a duel while composing a ballad at the same time.

I love a good fictional swordfight! Thinking of others that I’ve read, one of the most memorable is the one that takes place towards the end of The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. Unfortunately I can’t say any more about that wonderful scene, as to tell you who it involves or how it came about would most certainly mean spoiling the story!

The Game of Kings appeared on my list of favourite books read in 2012. Looking back at my 2012 list, it seems that I read some great books that year – and, in particular, some great historical fiction novels. One of these was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the first of her excellent novels on the life of Thomas Cromwell, and this brings my chain for this month to an end.

Have you read any of the books in my chain? Did you take part yourself this month?

In August, we are going to begin with Atonement by Ian McEwan.