It’s time for #6Degrees – join in! Link up! Get into it!
We begin this month with Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (as picked by Jenny). I haven’t read it but my husband has – this is significant because my husband rarely reads novels.
Every summer, my non-novel-reading husband takes Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, on our beach holiday. He hasn’t read it (yet) but it still comes with us each year. It has become a running joke when we’re packing and I say, “Have you got Shantaram?”
Those that are familiar with Shantaram will know that it’s not a small book (944 pages). My book group usually chooses something heftier for summer reading and a couple of years ago they picked Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (768 pages). I must confess, I pulled a Shantaram on this one – the book came on holiday with me but I never even opened it!
But I did see the movie. Around the same time as The Imitation Game was out, so was The Theory of Everything, a movie about Stephen Hawking and his book, A Brief History of Time. I’ve read the start of every chapter in Hawking and then drift toward the end – so not quite a Shantaram…
From a ‘brief history’ to ‘the noise’ with the latest from Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time. Haven’t read it (yet) but it sits alongside another ARC I have from the beginning of the year, Beside Myself by Ann Morgan.
Beside Myself is a story about identical twin sisters, as is Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld – Sisterland also happens to be another book that I have an ARC of and which I haven’t yet read.
So, apart from my clever links between the books, the overarching theme for me this month is ‘books I haven’t read – yet’. I wonder where other chains will lead?
Next month (August 6th, 2016) the chain will begin with an international best-selling debut – Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.