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 Elizabeth Day’s exploration of friendship, Friendaholic.
One of my favourite quotes about friendship comes from Phosphorescence by Julia Baird, who describes long friendships as the ‘…crossbeams of our resilience.’
The main theme of Baird’s book was the concept of ‘awe’. When I was browsing the new releases at Readings a couple of weeks ago, I came across Awe by Dacher Keltner.
On that same bookshop visit, I bought Heartbake by Charlotte Ree. It is a beautiful book to hold. A quick glance at my bookshelf, and the last cloth-bound and embossed book I bought was The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin.
I opened The Novel Cure to see what the authors recommended for reading about friendship but before I got there, I saw a list of the ‘Ten Best Novels for Fifty-Somethings’. I turned 50 last year – reason enough to make my next link to a book on that list, Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates.
I’ve read nearly all of Yates’s work but one that is still on the list is a short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
Where will other chains go? Link up below or post your link in the comments section.
Next month (July 1, 2023), we’ll start with the winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel.
