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 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I recently saw the film and loved it. I’ve also seen another excellent film adaptation this year – Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.
Hamnet focuses on the death of a son, as does Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow (both of Li’s sons died by suicide).
The same week I read Li’s memoir, I also read Miriam Toews’s memoir, A Truce That is Not Peace. Coincidentally, she quotes Li.
In A Truce That is Not Peace, Toews outlines her idea for a wind museum. She’s actually done a lot of thinking about it and I wondered if she will read Helm by Sarah Hall – Helm is the story of a wind. Another side note: the ‘wuther’ of Wuthering Heights is British dialect for a fierce wind.
All things weather made me think of The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn, a book about amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard, who assigned poetic names to the clouds in 1802.
Howard’s naming of clouds became important to not just meteorology, but also in art, where the painting of sky and clouds were captured in the works of the Romantics. This links to one of my favourite books in my cloud-spotting collection (I have a bunch of books about clouds), Constable’s Skies by Mark Evans.
I went from film adaptations to weather – where will other chains go? Link up below or post your link in the comments section.
Next month (April 4, 2026), we’ll start with Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent.
