Picture found at: https://www.melindatognini.com.au
#6Degrees
Six degrees of separation:
from beach reading to beach walking
Time for another quirky variation on this meme – and quite quirky!
I decided to include more books that are on my Goodreads TBR,
and not just stick to books I have read, to bring in more diversity,
and I was shocked I ended up on the beach, where I started!
Using my own rules for this fun meme hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest
(see there the origin of the meme and how it works
– posted the first Saturday of every month).
Here are my own quirky rules:
1. Use your list of books on Goodreads
2. Take the first word of the title (or in the subtitle) offered and find another title with that word in it – see the titles below the images to fully understand, as often the word could be in the second part of the title
3. Then use the first word of THAT title to find your text title
4. Or the second if the title starts with the same word, or if you are stuck
5. To help you understand what I’m doing, you will find in orange the word that will be used in the following title, and in green the word used in the previous title
We are supposed to start from Beach Read, by Emily Henry.
I have not read it, nor plan to do so.
1. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, by Noël Riley Fitch
I did warn you it was going to be even more quirky!
So from beach in the title, I went to beach as the author’s name.
“The story of Sylvia Beach’s love for Shakespeare and Company supplies the lifeblood of this book.” Definitelyone I want to read.
2. A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar
And we are going back to an author’s name, using a word form the previous title!
I did read this one. This is the thorough biography of “John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s.”
It is actually a very sad story. It’s one the rare cases where I found the movie better than the book, in the sense that in the movie, Nash’s wife is full of loving care for him.
In real life, they divorced, and things were very difficult, as can be expected with such a disturbed genius.
3. The Most Beautiful Book in the World, by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
I have read and really enjoyed several books by this Belgian author, like Oscar and the Lady in Pink, and Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur’an, but I still have to read this one, which is actually a collection of 8 novellas.
4. The Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend, by Lucy Pollard-Gott
I have reviewed and often recommended this book, written by a book reviewer and friend.
VERDICT: Smart presentation and ranking of literary characters, across countries and times. If you believe in diversity in literature and consider yourself a lover of books, you absolutely need to have this reference volume on your shelf.
5. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, by Umberto Eco
Umberto is such an amazing author, novelist of course, but also essayist (I so enjoyed Chronicles of a Liquid Society), professor of semiotics, and author of many books on language.
This book was originally a The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture.
REading the synopsis, you can understand why it would be on my TBR:
“In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader–his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O’Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval’s Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.”
6. Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, by Ben Shattuck
Yes, I do have 2 books on my TBR starting with “six walks!”
I added this one after I recently read two books by Thoreau, and an excellent one on him. See my review: Lessons from Walden: Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy,
by Bob Pepperman Taylor.
Here is the synopsis for this one:
“On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.”
And here you go: from beach reading, to a book about walking the beaches!
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Words And Peace 