It’s time again for my favourite meme. Based on the concept of six degrees of separation, Emma Chapman and Annabel Smith have created #6DEGREES, where bloggers share links between books in six moves. Check out the rules if you want to play along.
We begin with Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, this year’s winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin. I haven’t read it. Yet. I know, I always read the Miles Franklin winner… Anyway, it doesn’t stop me from participating and my first link is to Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany. Obviously there are birds in both titles, but both books are also Australian prize-winners (Tiffany won the inaugural Stella Prize for Mateship).
Animals are an important part of Mateship, as they are in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the best book I’ve read (so far) this year. The nice thing about blogging is that you have a record of other books you considered the ‘best’ in any given year, so the next link is to my 2012 favourite, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
The Art of Fielding is only partly a baseball story, as is Liz Moore’s Heft, a fantastic book that didn’t get the exposure or credit it deserved (in my opinion).
Morbid obesity is the central theme in both Heft and Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins and is the basis of my fifth link.
Attenberg manages to include food in almost every scene in The Middlesteins and, most importantly, uses it to tell a broader story. The same can be said for Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet (and if you’ve read both books, you’ll see an additional link between Middlesteins and Banquet).
From birds and animals to baseball and cake, that’s the fun of #6DEGREES.
