Six Degrees of Separation - March 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.

The first book in the chain is ‘Passages’ by Gail Sheehy, which is a class self-help book from the seventies that looks at the changes that happen when we reach various age milestones in life. As someone with one of those ‘big birthdays’ coming up later in the year, it might be a book for me to add to the TBR pile.

It’s an easy jump to the next pick, another classic self-help book that also connects the word ‘passage’ to ‘way’. One of the main habits in this book that I developed was the use of morning pages to allow me to bypass my inner critic. Each morning, I wrote 3 A4 pages of handwritten stream of conscious notes. I occasionally tinker with short stories, so I use them to get the juices flowing again and I think it’s a useful practice for anyone who feels creatively blocked and is seeking inspiration.

Artists and inspiration leads me to ‘The Colony’ by Audrey Mageee, where an English artist called Lloyd lands on an island off Irelands west coast in the to paint the cliffs and wildlife. This book was long listed for the booker, and also reminds me that it’s Reading Ireland month over at 746 books. Colonies of a different kind exist in….

‘Sea of tranquility’ by Emily St. John mandel - there are three of them in fact, all on the moon. A detective called Gaspery Roberts lives on the colony known as ‘the night city….the place where the sky was always black’ because the failure of the protective dome’s artificial lighting system was judged too expensive to fix. A bit like the potholes on the roads around here. Pothole city has a nice ring to it. Anyway, detectives and moons leads me nicely to…..

‘Moonflower murders’ by Anthony Horowitz, a well crafted and tightly plotted ‘book within a book’ about the murder of a guest at a picturesque hotel on the Suffolk coast. But is the man already convicted innocent? Susan Ryeland investigates. The moonflower is a species native to South America, so it’s an easy jump to……

‘A long petal of the sea’ by Isabel Allende a historical and multi-generational epic about refugees who escape the Spanish civil war to Chile on a boat chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda. Petals lead me onto….

the diary entries of 14 year old Dara McAnulty in ‘Diary of a young naturalist’. It’s a powerful description of his devotion to nature and the solace it provides him, as well as his life as an activist. And it’s a good place to end this months six degrees.