Six Degrees of Separation - April 23

First Friday of the month, so time for #6degrees of separation, hosted by Kate over at Books are my favourite and best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

First up is ‘Born to Run’ by Bruce Springsteen. I don’t mind Bruce, but wouldn’t be interested enough to read a biography about him. One songwriters biography that I did enjoy was…..

‘A furious devotion - the biography of Shane Macgowan’ from his formatives years, his life as a punk rocker and later frontman of the Pogues, and a songwriter of some renown.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Shares ancestral home is in Tipperary, which is where we find three generations of Alyward women in…..

‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ by Donal Ryan and if we’re looking for a link to royalty it’s an easy jump to make to….

a ‘King’ and a princess in Stephen Kings '(see what I did there?) ‘Fairy tale’. (Fairytale and Shane macgown is another link!) A Fairy tale is a type of myth, which leads me nicely to…

‘Thirty-two words for field’ by Manchán Magan, which looks at the roots of the Irish language in the mythology, nature and animals of the land. Gaeilge has some great words, such as Iarmhaireacht - the loneliness felt at cockrow, when you are the only person awake and experience that existential pang of disconnection, of not belonging. I have a tendency to reach for my phone and indulge in a bit of doom scrolling at this time, which takes me to…….

‘Stolen Focus’ by Johann Hari about how our attention spans have been stolen by the technology giants and how it’s imperative for us to regain it if we’re going to tackle the problems facing the world. Exploitation and theft of the worlds resources is also explored in..

‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton, a page turning literary thriller set in New Zealand that I recently enjoyed.

And that’s it for another month.