It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.
This month we begin with Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. The first half of the novel explores the ridiculous and fleeting nature of opinions and advice in the online world. Lockwood writes –
Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet…
The obvious link is to the book I’m currently reading, Kaz Cooke’s You’re Doing It Wrong. Cooke examines the history of ‘bad and bonkers advice’ given to women. It’s both fascinating and frightening.
You’re Doing It Wrong is the second book I’ve read for the 2022 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. The first was Really Saying Something by Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward.
Woodward was in a relationship with Andrew Ridgeley for many years, so my next link is to his memoir, Wham! George & Me.
From fact to fiction, Teddy Wayne’s novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, tells the story of a teen rock star.
Jonny Valentine is managed by his mother. Similarly, in Pretty Ugly by Kirker Butler, Bailey is managed by her mother to become a child beauty pageant star.
In an effort to sabotage her own pageant career, Bailey eats cookies while the treadmill is ‘running’. It’s darkly humorous, as is Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space, which features a middle-aged man who begins training for a grueling triathlon, despite having never previously exercised.
From unwanted advice for women to rock stars and running – where will other chains go? Link up below or post your link in the comments section.
Next month (March 5, 2022), we’ll begin with a modern classic, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.
