It’s time for #6Degrees – join in! Link up!
We begin this month’s chain with the controversial eighties best-seller by V. C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic. It’s truly a diabolical book and in 1987, I couldn’t put it down.
Like Flowers, I read I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz, while I really should have been studying.
I’ll Take Manhattan is about the cutthroat world of magazine publishing, as is Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada.
I think the best thing I can say about Devil is that Meryl Streep was extraordinary in the movie version. And it is a rare case of the movie being far better than the book. The same can be said for Isak Dinesen’s memoir, Out of Africa. I love the movie, which also starred Meryl Streep.
Out of Africa is set in Kenya, as is White Mischief by James Fox. Again, the movie version of this book was terrific, and its opening scene left me with a lasting impression of glamorous (but no doubt inaccurate) colonial living in the 1920s.
When it comes to glamour and frivolous lifestyles, it’s hard to go past Winifred Watson’s charming novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
Miss Pettigrew was published in 1938. Which brings to mind another Art-Deco-New-York story, set in 1938, The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.
From tawdry brother-sister relations, to publishing in New York, to Africa and back to New York – where will other chains take us?
Next month (October 1st, 2016), and in honour of the imminent release of his first new novel in more than a decade, the chain will begin with the book that started it all for Jonathan Safran Foer – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.