Six Degrees of Separation: Phosphorescence to Hot Six

 Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month the starting point is a book called Phosphoresence by Julia Baird. Actually it's full title is Phosphorence: On Awe, Wonder and Thing That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark. It does sound interesting, even if it isn't my normal type of book. It was, however, quite a tricky title to start a chain with.

In the end I started thinking about what does the word phosphoresence mean, which lead me to the word glow. I was sure that years ago I had a book by a YA author that was called that but I couldn't find any reference to it anywhere so maybe I was misremembering. Instead I continued to ponder those two words and that lead me to think about things that glow (or at least they are represented that way in cartoons and movies). This is turn led me to the idea of nuclear power which uses uranium which in one form is known as yellowcake which leads me to the book of the same name by Margo Lanagan! Phew! That was quite a lot of thinking to get me to that first link.

Margo Lanagan also wrote a book about selkies, creatures from Scottish myth, called either Sea Hearts or The Brides of Roll Rock Island depending on where it was published. This is a book I have used before in Six Degrees and the book I was thinking of linking too next is the same one I used last time, so I had to take a different turn.

One of my favourite  fairy tale retellers in Kate Forsyth and I have picked her book The Beast's Garden which is a fairytale retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

A book that I read last year, set in the immediate aftermath of WWII in Germany was Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees. Obviously there was plenty of food mentioned in this one!

The book I am currently reading is called A New York Secret by Ella Carey which features a young woman who is vyiing to become a chef in a New York restaurant during WWII, and again features lots of food. My review of this book will be up later this week.

From here I took an unexpected turn!  One of the characters in A New York Secret is called Tom Morelli, and so I couldn't go past the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich. One of the two main male characters in this series is a cop called Joe Morelli. Now the Stephanie Plum books start with a book called One for the Money and continued through to Twisted Twenty-Six before she stopped using the numbers to name the books.  I stopped reading at Notorious Nineteen. It seems only right to choose Hot Six for this meme.

Next month's starting point is going to be Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.