Six Degrees of Separation – from Sandwich to The Hippopotamus Marsh

Somehow I've just discovered this bookish meme, Six Degrees of Separation, which has been ongoing since 2014! The idea is that the host (Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest) selects a book on the first Saturday of each month, and then readers make a chain of six more books that are linked in some way. You can then link it up at her blog. She says:

Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.

A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain.

This sounded fun, and I looked at a few of the other participants to get an idea of how they do it. Lots of interesting thematic, personal or quirky links, with people ending up with very different books as their final choice.  

This month the initial prompt was Sandwich by Catherine Newman. So here is my chain! 

Sandwich by Catherine Newman is about Rocky, a woman in her 50s who travels to the same summer cottage in Cape Cod every year - this summer it's a whole whack of family in the small cottage and Rocky is thinking about life.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach: this novel also features a middle aged woman in a bit of a life crisis, finding herself in a place by the sea - this time in a luxury hotel among strangers, rather than a cottage with lots of family, but the sense of discovery of self is similar. 

This then made me think of This Summer Will Be Different by Carly Fortune. In this one a younger woman at the start of her life has to make a key romantic decision. Set in Prince Edward Island, near the sea, at a family home that the main character returns to again and again. 

One of the elements of Fortune's book is an homage to Lucy Maud Montgomery, PEI's best known author. So thanks to the evocation of PEI and the Anne industry there, I'm going with Anne of Green Gables as my third link! 

The inspiration writers find from Anne Shirley and LMM's writing makes me think of a biography I recently came across, Anne’s Cradle: The Life of Hanako Muraoka, by Eri Muraoka, about the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables. It tells the story of her life and looks at how her translation created the LMM craze in Japan that's still going strong.

The Japanese focus of  Anne's Cradle, plus Anne's well known friendship with Diana, and their storytelling/writing adventures, makes me think of a recent Japanese book, Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa. In this one the narrator Tomoko and her cousin Mina become bosom friends when Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt's family for a year, in Ashiya, on the coast. And Mina writes a lot of tiny stories to share only with Tomoko.

And finally that brings me to book 6, Pauline Gedge's The Hippopotamus Marsh. In Mina's Matchbox, the main character owns a pygmy hippo, Pochiko, who she rides to school - as seen on the cover. Gedge's book in the first in an excellent series about Egyptian dynastic wars and history. But it has hippos in the title! 

From Cape Cod to Egypt, via PEI and Japan, this chain has taken us on quite a journey :)