Six Degrees of Separation, May 2024 edition

It’s rare that I catch this great game early enough in the month, but this time, I’m going to play along! Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate at Books are my favourite and best: Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.

This month’s book is The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop. I haven’t read it and don’t know the author, but Kate writes about a man falling from the ship during a cruise, a marriage between two creative people where the power dynamic has recently shifted. It made me think of Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning in 1981, and it got me thinking about other drownings with some power dynamic.

So my first book is Black water by Joyce Carol Oates, a retelling of the mysterious Chappaquiddick incident, in which U.S. senator Ted Kennedy crashed a car and caused the death by drowning of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969. By the way, ugly book covers, but that were the 1990s. We didn’t have Bookstagram.

From that one I have to pick a novel with the Kennedy connexion, one of my favorite books, although one of the biggest as well: 11/22/63 by Stephen King, an alternate history version of the Dallas assassination. Weirdly enough, I didn’t post about it here, although I read it in 2016. It somehow fell through the cracks, which is very appropriate for a Stephen King book. There’s rarely a month in which I don’t think about this book.

For my third pick I could have gone all King, but I’m choosing a book whose title is only made of numbers: 1984 by George Orwell, a dystopia classic that was written in 1949. Like many, I read it at school, and I’ve not re-read it, although I can still remember it quite well.

I hesitated with other dictatorial nightmares and dystopian novels, but no, too obvious and too sad. So instead I’m picking Orwell’s Down and out in Paris and London, a book I have on my shelves somewhere and am curious about (maybe for the Summer challenge?) That’s George Orwell well before 1984, and also before he fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. I’m interested to see him as a young man (I understand this is mostly autobiographical, a sort of auto-fiction) and also what life was like in that era in the big cities.

When it comes to poverty memoirs, it seems to be a whole genre. The one that springs to mind first, although I didn’t like it, is Angela’s Ashes by Franck McCourt. I don’t remember when I read that one (it was pushed into my hands, and it was everywhere), but I remember hating the accumulation of misery, page after page. I remember finding the book whiny, and as a French person I know about Debbie Downers!

Of course I could not finish on something so depressing, and I hated that people view Ireland through this book only. So I’m choosing the most luminous, kind and beautiful Irish book I know: Foster by Claire Keegan. It’s not all fun and rosy but the writing is emotional and light.

From Australia to Ireland, from a famous film director and a successful writer to a small girl far from her family, this month’s literary travel has taken me quite far from the starting point! What about you?