It’s Grand Final day in Melbourne but it’s also #6Degrees day (am I stretching the friendship, saying that they compare?!). Anyway, three cheers for reading great books and three cheers for joining in!
We begin this month’s chain with Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-seller, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I was totally immersed in this book, to the detriment of what was going on around me… Which happened to be a holiday in Palm Cove.
The other book that I took on that holiday (and I remember because I spent so much time crying by the pool as I read) was One Day by David Nicholls.
One Day has an ‘oh dear God’ moment, much like The Children Act by Ian McEwan – it’s a short book but McEwan delivers his trademark moral twist.
Some of The Children Act takes place in the courtroom, as does Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty.
Apple Tree Yard has been sitting in my reading stack for ages, along with another book that I set aside for the ‘titles with trees’ category of the What’s In a Name? Reading Challenge – Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (see what I did there?!).
Clearly Foer loves visual writing and unconventional publishing – Extremely Loud and Tree are both great examples, as is the ‘choose-your-own-ending-wheel-of-fortune’ in Caroline Smailes’s e-book, 99 Reasons Why.
The main character in 99 Reasons Why, Kat, believes that Princess Diana is her biological mother. Have I mentioned how much I love the Royals? When I was 11 (and living briefly in England), I invited Princess Diana to my birthday party (I had access to a stately home so it would have been more than a glass of lemonade and a bowl of Cheezels affair). Diana politely declined and to make up for it, my accomplice, Keith, a guy my dad worked with, gave me a copy of Craig Brown and Lesley Cunliffe’s The Book of Royal Lists. Although I don’t refer to the book as often as I did in 1984, it still holds a special place on my bookshelf.
From New York, London and courtrooms to a book that must be seen to be understood, Scottish estates and palaces – where will other chains lead?
Is it horror, science-fiction or dystopian? Next month (November 5th, 2016) we begin the chain with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.