Six Degrees of Separation: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

It’s time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links to my reviews are in the titles of the books chosen. The starter book this month is:

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

It’s also our 20 Books of Summer Buddy Read and I’ve literally just finished reading it – and need some time to calm down before commenting further, so without further ado, I’ll go straight to my first link via a period of time to…

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Before you ask – yes, that does make 1001 nights. Rushdie’s 2015 novel may have its roots in the ancient tales but it is also a thoroughly modern story of what happens when worlds collide and life becomes decidedly strange. I started reading this novel expecting more strangeness given that the setting is in New York of the near future, but instead got a wild philosophical fantasy ,with an ancient jinn from ‘Peristan’ loose in the city, that was fun and thought-provoking, definitely a thinking person’s fairy tale. A slightly shorter period of time is…

In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor

The first of her novels that I read, this made an instant fan of me. Published in 1961, it follows one summer in the lives of a family living in the Thames Valley. In the first half of the movel we find out what makes them all tick – and frankly, it’s all about sex. Kate with her younger husband, Tom with his girlfriends, and Louisa’s growing awareness and crush on the young curate in the village. In that terribly repressed middle-class way, everyone says one thing and means another. The author takes a scalpel to these relationships and dissects them with sensitivity and wit, bringing things to a climax with great skill. Narrowing down the time period further takes us to…

August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien

Ellen, a young Irishwoman, is separated from her husband. As the book opens, he has arrived to take their young son off on a long camping trip. Ellen waves them goodbye, and a few days later she’s no longer missing them, for she has company. Her lover is a married man with kids, and another mistress too. Ellen is under no illusions, and bored at work and between trysts, she takes a holiday to the South of France on the spur of the moment, where she has some Hemingwayesque adventures with plenty of drink, party, drink, get bored, drink, drive, drink, fight, drink, party, drink… This 1965 novella has so much light and shade – being racy and earthy, and full of the joys of love and nature, with some robust language, she describes a certain something as like a ‘foxglove‘ – ‘high and purple‘! Narrowing it down again…

Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The basic premise of the 1964 story by the Russian brothers is simple. Young programmer, Sasha Privalov is en route to meet friends in Karelia, when he picks up two hitchhikers, who on hearing of his profession, offer to put him up and hope to persuade him to stay and work at their institute nearby, which he does. The second and third parts of the book comprise two episodes from his new working life there. The execution of the story though is totally bonkers, madcap, and hilarious. It’s nigh-on impossible to understand what’s going on, but I just went with the flow and enjoyed it very much, which leads to …

A Weekend with Claude by Beryl Bainbridge

This was Beryl’s second proper novel written when she was 24, but first to be published in 1967, however, she radically revised and rewrote it in 1981. It has a dual time-line told from different PoV. with a framing story starting in the book’s unspecified present, which I assume is several years after the events of the other story strand. In the present, we meet Claude, an antiques dealer and his partner Julia. A couple find a photo and letter in the desk they’re buying. which Claude hurriedly reclaims, before starting to wax lyrical about the people in the snap and that weekend back in 1960 with Lily, Edward, Norman and Shebah…. Someone will get shot. Finally lengthening the time period again we reach…

A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno

I read the book of Eno’s 1995 diary pre-blog. Sadly I didn’t keep my original copy, but bought the 25th anniversary edition which has a new foreword by Eno. Going back to my books read spreadsheet I found a four word review. I simple wrote

‘What an interesting man.’

Which brings us round circle just about.

My picks this month have circled the globe from New York to Russia surrounded by stays in England and that holiday in the South of France. Where will yours take you this month?